Ida
Drama
•
1h 22m
Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski • Drama • With Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska • 2014 • 80 minutes
From acclaimed director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) comes Ida, a moving and intimate drama about a young novitiate nun in 1960s Poland who, on the verge of taking her vows, makes a shocking discovery about her past. 18-year old Anna (stunning newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska), a sheltered orphan raised in a convent, is preparing to become a nun when the Mother Superior insists she first visit her sole living relative. Naïve, innocent Anna soon finds herself in the presence of her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a worldly and cynical Communist Party insider, who shocks her with the declaration that her real name is Ida and her Jewish parents were murdered during the Nazi occupation. This revelation triggers a heart-wrenching journey into the countryside, to the family house and into the secrets of the repressed past, evoking the haunting legacy of the Holocaust and the realities of postwar Communism. In this beautifully directed film, Pawlikowski returns to his native Poland for the first time in his career to confront some of the more contentious issues in the history of his birthplace. Powerfully written and eloquently shot, Ida a masterly evocation of a time, a dilemma, and a defining historical moment; Ida is also personal, intimate, and human. The weight of history is everywhere, but the scale falls within the scope of a young woman learning about the secrets of her own past. This intersection of the personal with momentous historic events makes for what is surely one of the most powerful and affecting films of the year.
"Let yourself be enveloped by a modern cinema classic." —Rolling Stone
Critics' Pick! "One of the finest European films in recent memory." —The New York Times
Up Next in Drama
-
Dedalus
Directed by Jonah Greenstein • Drama • With Alexander Horner, Thomas Jay Ryan, Ashley Robicheaux • 2020 • 92 minutes
DEDALUS is a fiction triptych portraying community, love, and loss.
In rural Iowa, a grocery cashier watches helplessly as classmates conceal their act of sexual violence against...
-
Tell No One
Directed by Guillaume Canet • Drama • With Francois Cluzet • 2006 • 125 minutes
Tell No One is based on Harlan Coben’s international best selling thriller about pediatrician Alexandre Beck, who still grieves the murder of his beloved wife Margot Beck eight years earlier. When two bodies are foun...
-
No Light and No Land Anywhere
Directed by Amber Sealy • Drama • With Gemma Brockis, Jennifer LaFleur, Kent Osborne, David Sullivan • 2018 • 75 minutes
Grieving her mother’s death and her own failing marriage, Lexi boards a plane from London to Los Angeles in search of the estranged father who abandoned her when she was three...