Question: which iconic filmmaker has had his share of glory at the Oscars but also been plagued by scandals and tragedy? That question alone would have a long list of contenders. So let me add another detail by saying that the person in question has legal problems that continue to this day. With that tidbit in place you can now probably guess that this distinction goes to Roman Polanski.

Polanski was nominated for an Oscar for Rosemary’s Baby (1969, Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium), Chinatown (1974, Best Director), Tess (1979, Best Director), The Pianist (2002, Best Picture) and for that same film he finally received the Oscar for Best Director, accepted in absentia by Harrison Ford (who was presenting at the awards show). Ford flew to France five months later to personally hand the award to Polanski, who hasn’t set foot in the U.S. since 1978 when he fled the country to avoid imprisonment for a conviction of statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. The details behind his conviction are the focus of a new documentary that debuted at the most recent Sundance Film Festival.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (directed by Marina Zenovich, 2008) is a fascinating look at many key aspects behind the trial and was favorably received by both audiences and distributors (it was one of the first films to get picked up at the festival by HBO and the Weinstein Co.).

Polanski has lived through more epochal craziness than most mortal men. He survived the Nazi concentration camps (his mother did not), he escaped from the Polish ghetto, was feted in Europe for his early film work, got an undiluted taste of the swinging sixties in London during an ascendancy of bohemian culture that seemed to mirror his own success, had a fairy tale marriage to the beautiful Sharon Tate, and then came the nightmare of Manson’s orchestrated slayings of Tate (eight-months pregnant with her and Polanski’s child). Before this was Rosemary’s Baby. After this was Chinatown. And then there’s Jack Nicholson.

In 1977 Polanski was reported to have taken then 13-year-old Samantha Gailey (with mother’s consent) over to Jack Nicholson’s home on Mulholland Drive for a photographic session that would end with Polanski allegedly giving the young girl champagne and Quaaludes and assaulting her. Polanski would at one point claim consensual sex. The American press was quick to crucify Polanski. The European press was decidedly more sympathetic toward the filmmaker. Either way, Polanski brought down a hornet’s nest that continues to sting him even years after Gailey (now Samantha Geimer) publicly forgave him in 1997.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired provides good archival footage of the aforementioned milestones, and much more, but sticks closely to the trial itself and, by doing so, reveals the other key players in the film to be: Laurence J. Rittenband (an overzealous judge who uses his pulpit to command center-stage), Roger Gunson (the assistant D.A. who prosecuted the case), and Douglas Dalton (Polanski’s attorney). The resulting disclosures of these three people (Rittenband died in 1993, so is represented in archival footage and the testimony of others) is unexpectedly revealing insofar as it casts light on how easily the American court system can be turned into a sadistic circus, one that can easily stray afar from its purported goal of blind justice.