European Film Academy criticises attack on Ida

The European Film Academy (EFA) has got behind a protest against a perceived attack on Paweł Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning film Ida by Poland’s public broadcaster TVP.

Last week the Guild of Polish Directors, together with a group of some 90 film critics, wrote protest letters to chairman of public broadcaster TVP Jacek Kurski, in protest of the channel’s treatment of the film.

On 25 February channel TVP2 broadcast Ida, preceded by an editorial programme titled Around Ida, which included a studio discussion on the film.

According to the protest letters, the film, which explores the divisive issue of Polish complicity in the Holocaust, was presented in a one-sided way.

“Everyone presented similar opinions on the subject of Ida, to a greater or lesser degree accusing the film of being anti-Polish,” the film critics’ protest letter read.

“Ida was presented in a biased and harmful way,” the directors stated in their own letter. Signatories included Andrzej Wajda, Wojciech Smarzowski, Jan Komasa, and Agnieszka Holland, among over 40 other filmmakers.

According to the EFA, the TVP editorial ended with a sequence of title cards displaying nationalistic messages that could have been mistakenly understood to form part of Pawlikowski’s film.

In a statement, EFA’s board said that while it believes in defending “the plurality of opinions about films, and the right for open discussions about them, it cannot accept the manipulation of such a discussion by a one-sided judgement preceding its screening”.

These developments come soon after the Polish government announced plans in mid-February to introduce a law making it a criminal offence to imply the country bears any responsibility for atrocities carried out on Polish territory by Nazi Germany.

Ida centres on a young Polish nun who discovers that her parents were Jewish and were murdered during the German occupation of Poland in the Second World War.

Source: Screen Daily and Radio Poland