NEW YORK — Jewish French film director Claude Lanzmann denied accusations that he sexually harassed a guard at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport.

A female Israeli security guard filed a complaint on Wednesday saying that Lanzmann, who directed the landmark 1985 documentary film “Shoah,” hugged and kissed her from behind following a security check, Ha’aretz reported.

In an interview with the French news agency AFP, Lanzmann claimed that he was briefly detained and temporarily stripped of his passport.

“I put my finger under her chin and said ironically to my assistants, ‘look how charming she is,’ ” Lanzmann told AFP in his account of the incident, denying that he had done anything else.

“Judging by the behavior of the security girls at Ben Gurion, Israel is a mixture of Kabul, Tehran and specialists in U.S. gender studies,” he added.

Israeli police declined to comment on the incident.

“Shoah,” a nine-hour compilation of interviews with Holocaust survivors, received substantial funding from the Israeli government at the discretion of Menachem Begin when he was prime minister.