IDA
Polish
Cinema
Ida is a Polish drama film directed by Pawel Pawlikowski that was released in 2013. In February 2015, Ida won the Oscar of Best Foreign Language Film.
Ida is a beautiful black and white movie in which silence and portraiture play an important part. The film is set in Poland in 1961 during the Stalinist dictatorship and almost every element in the story evokes the war years and their aftermath.
Ida is a 17-year-old orphan who has never gone out of the convent where she lives and who must pronounce her vows. Her Mother Superior encourages her to visit her aunt in Lodz before she takes orders. Wanda Gruz (Agata Kulesza) tells her niece that her real name is Ida Lebenstein, and that she is Jewish.
Together they go to the countryside to understand the past and the death of Ida’s parents during the Nazi occupation. They discover that Ida's parents were first hidden by Polish farmers in the forest. But after a time, her parents were finally executed by one of their rescuers and died in atrocioius conditions, their bodies burried in the forest without a grave.
Throughout the film, Ida discovers life outside the convent and meet some of her contemporaries like jazz musicians.
Catholicism, anti-Semitism and communism are confronted with family and personal trajectories. Agata Kulesza (Wanda) and Agata Trzebuchowska (Ida) comprise two different metaphorical characters of the disappearance of the Polish Jews, the niece who believes in heaven and the aunt who does not.
Ida is a very special roadmovie and “an art film in the finest sense of the term — it is austere technique counterbalanced by emotions that bleed” (Rolling Stones, Peter Travers, February 2015).
Ida is a very special movie that will not leave you indifferent through its artistic singularity and the tale of these women played by two remarkable actresses.
Agathe Moulin
France