Absent Roman Polanski wins Best Director at Berlin Film Festival

The best director was also the absent director. Roman Polanski was the ghost at the feast at the Berlin film festival at the weekend where he won his first major award since being arrested on a three-decade-old charge of having sex with a minor.

Instead of picking up his 'Silver Bear' award for directing The Ghost Writer, Polanski was languishing in his Swiss chalet with an electronic foot-cuff ensuring that he can get no further than his garden.

The 76 year old, who made his name with films such asRosemary's Baby andChinatown was, said his producer Alain Sarde, "very happy" about winning the prize for the film which is about a writer hired to complete the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister.

Based on the novel, The Ghost, by Robert Harris, the viewers are left in little doubt that the Prime Minister (played by Pierce Brosnan) is modelled on Tony Blair.

Mr Polanski made plain, through his producer, that he was disenchanted by film festivals.

"When I was lamenting with Roman that he cannot be with us," said Mr Sarde, "he said to me,'even if I could I wouldn't because the last time I went to a festival to get a prize I ended up in jail."

The director was arrested by the Swiss authorities last September on his way to receive a prize. A Los Angeles court has demanded his extradition to the US face charges, dating back to 1977, of having sex with a 13-year-old girl.

Since fleeing California in order to avoid conviction, Polanski has been officially ranked as a fugitive and has avoided the US.

He has lived primarily in Paris, but has a chalet in the Swiss resort of Gstaad - which has become his prison until a decision is made on his extradition.

The role of absent director is thus not completely new to Polanski, who was born in Poland. In 2002 he won the Best Director Oscar for The Pianist, a gruelling account of survival in the Warsaw ghetto - but could not travel to Hollywood to pick up the coveted statuette.

Although much of the action of The Ghost Writer takes place in Martha's Vineyard in coastal Massachussetts, there was no question of being able to shoot on location.

Rather, the beach scenes were filmed on the German island of Sylt, in the North Sea.

London - from where Polanski could also have been extradited - was replicated in a Berlin street. By the time he was arrested in Switzerland the film was almost complete and he was able to complete much of the post-production work in his Gstaad chalet, which has a film-viewing room in the basement.

The film has been praised by Berlin critics for its use of claustrophobic settings - an echo of Polanski's early works in Communist Poland - which underline how trapped the former Prime Minister has become, as he is under investigation for war crimes.

The ghost writer, played by Ewan McGregor, sent in to pep up the memoirs, uncovers dark secrets. But the parallels between the politician-at-bay and Polanski's own situation - both trapped in their holiday compounds - are striking and, one assumes, deliberate.

"I think it must have been the similarities between life and fiction that subconsciously drew him to the story in the first place," said Robert Harris after the film had its premiere in Berlin.