Synopsis

Poland 1962. Novice Anna is preparing to take her vow. However, before she may do so, the abbess gives the woman, who grew up as an orphan, a surprising task: She has to meet her last living relative. Anna drives to the city to meet an aunt she has never seen before. It’s immediately clear that the meeting of Anna and Wanda, a sophisticated judge who is loyal to the party, will change both of their lives entirely. In impressive black-and-white pictures, Director Pawl Pawlikowski tells silently yet intensively the story of these two women who couldn’t be more different, yet share two defining similarities. Both are caught between tradition and modern age and they both cannot forget. Ida is also a way of settlement with his own roots for the film maker who lives in England. His poetic yet clear cinematic approach to the then typical mixture of anti-Semitism, Catholicism and communism in Poland at that time has been assessed outstandingly well by international critics and has been multiply honoured, among others with the European Film Award and the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film. The bottom line is that Ida is a timelessly valid and sublime film that continues to have an effect for a long time.