The European Film Academy has joined protests against the Polish national broadcaster TVP’s treatment of the Oscar-winning film Ida, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, when its broadcast on 25 February was preceded by a heavily critical introduction. It follows a complaint by the Guild of Polish Directors, expressing its “outrage” over the incident.

The EFA, which gave Ida multiple awards at its 2014 ceremony, including best film, best director and the people’s choice award, objected strongly to the 12-minute introduction for “claiming the film to be inaccurate, alleging that it won an Oscar only because of its pro-Jewish point of view, and adding title cards in such a way that they could have been thought to be part of the film itself”.

The EFA added: “While the board of the European Film Academy defends 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 judgment preceding its screening.”

The Guild of Polish Directors had earlier accused TVP of “gross manipulation” and of “presenting [Ida’s] content untruthfully” in an open letter signed by a number of notable Polish film-makers, including Agnieszka Holland, Małgorzata Szumowska, Andrzej Wajda and Pawlikowski himself.

Ida, which deals with the experience of a Polish novitiate nun who discovers that her parents were Jewish and had been murdered during the second world war, became the first Polish film to win the best foreign film Oscar, at the 2015 ceremony. Ida also won best film and director at the Polish film awards in 2014.

Pawlikowski told Variety: “When [Ida] reached a worldwide audience, started winning awards and threatened to win an Oscar, [nationalists] used its growing exposure to their own advantage, as part of an election campaign based on fear, a sense of siege and crisis, saying that it’s anti-Polish and part of a sinister worldwide conspiracy by murky forces against the good image of Poland.”

“These nationalists don’t deal with the actual film at all. Most of them haven’t actually seen it. They use the film as a mere pretext to rouse patriotic sentiment and give vent to their neverending obsession with a supposed worldwide Jewish-German-leftwing-liberal-Russian [sic] conspiracy against Poland. It’s their outrageous xenophobic statements that do damage to our reputation abroad — not my film.”

TVP’s introduction included contributions from historian Piotr Gursztyn and film critic Krzysztof Kłopotowski, who, according to Variety, said: “If this film did not contribute to the defence of Jews in the Polish-Jewish conflict, then it would not get an Oscar.” It also featured Maciej Świrski of the Polish Anti-Defamation League, who has attacked the film in the past for supposed historical insensitivities.