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Wednesday 5 November 2014

Ida, Film Poland 2013, written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and director Pawel Pawilowski, 10* out of 10

"Ida" treats important subjects too big to ignore, indeed almost too big to cope with. The understated style of this film make it a most moving, and true tale about human resilience and its limits and about human nastiness beyond limits. The beautiful low key performances of Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska are outstanding. 


Poland in the early 1960s.  Eighteen-year-old orphaned Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska)  is preparing to take her vows as a nun in a catholic monastery. Before she does so, Mother Superior instructs her to spend time with an aunt, the sister of Anna’s mother, of whose existence Anna was uanaware.

Anna’s aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) turns out to be a former hard-line communist, who made her career as an unforgiving prosecutor in Polish political trials in the 1950s. Why has she avoided contact her niece? 

Wanda tells Anna about her Jewish mother and father who were killed in the war. She knows that searching for the truth about what happened to her sister will compel her to face the demons of her own past.

Anna whose birth name is Ida,  has to learn to live with her true and truly terrible family-history in a Polish society of which she is a part, an outsider, a victim and a shaper of her own future all at once. Will the young woman break down under the almost unbearable weight of her history? 

The dry, true, deeply tragic wisdom of her Aunt Wanda and a young Polish Jazz musician (Dawid Ogrodnik) whom the two women meet on their search for the truth may help her to cope; but the seemingly strong can be terribly vulnerable too. 

"Ida" treats important subjects too big to ignore, indeed almost too big to cope with. The understated style of this film make it a most moving, and true tale about human resilience and its limits and about human nastiness beyond limits. The beautiful low key performances of Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska are outstanding. 

Director Pawel Pawilowski does an excellent job in letting the story and its characters unfold. The black and white photography reveals many shades of grey in 1960s Poland. 

"Ida" demonstrates once more, if such a demonstration were needed, that the Lodz film school in which many first class Polish filmmakers are able to learn their craft is a great boon for quality cinema in Europe.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2718492/





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