Oscar-winning filmmaker Paul Haggis has been detained in Italy over allegations of sexual assault and aggravated personal injury, according to a statement from local prosecutors and his legal team.

The 69-year-old Canadian-born director and screenwriter, who won two Oscars for the 2004 crime drama "Crash," was in the country to attend a film festival that begins Tuesday in Ostuni, a tourist town in southern Italian region of Puglia.

After conducting a hearing that lasted several hours in the Brindisi courthouse, Judge Vilma Gilli issued the ruling that extends his detention for now in the hotel in the town of Ostuni, where he was supposed to participate in an arts festival this week

According to local media reports, Haggis first met his accuser at a film festival in Monte Carlo in April and has been in regular contact with her since then, which resulted in the invitation to Ostuni. The reports said the woman was then discovered in an “obvious confused state” at the local airport on Sunday, where she was helped and then taken to Brindisi’s police headquarters, where officers accompanied her to a local hospital for examination.

On Wednesday Paul made his first appearance in court in the southern Italian port city of Brindisi where he is answering questions related to allegations of sexual assault. “Paul Haggis explained how things went. He declared himself totally innocent, as he did in the immediate arrest,” the director’s Italian lawyer Michele Laforgia told reporters after the hearing.