On the eve of taking her vows, 18-year-old Anna (first-time screen actress Agata Trzebuchoska) receives some surprising news—she has an aunt. Before becoming a nun, Mother Superior says Anna must get to know her only living relative. And so the Polish orphan leaves the certainty of the convent’s sheltered sameness for her aunt’s worldly and uncertain existence. Upon their meeting, chain-smoking Aunt Wanda (Agneta Kulesza), a Communist official, bluntly informs the would-be nun that she is in fact Ida Lebenstein, and her Jewish family was murdered during the war.
Eventually the unlikely pair set off on a spiritual and physical journey to connect Ida to a painful past, uncovering secrets and atrocities that had been buried for years in the process. Cynical, alcoholic, promiscuous and filled with self-loathing, Wanda openly fluctuates between being in a position of power and succumbing to heartbreaking vulnerability. Meanwhile, Ida’s loss of innocence and quiet strength is entirely internalized, playing out through her actions and expressed subtly across her beautiful features. But both—the faithful and the faithless—are, in their own ways, struggling with issues around grief, identity and connection.
An estimated three million Jews (more than 90% of country’s Jewish population) were killed in Poland during the Nazi regime. Polish-born Pawel Pawlikowski’s intimate 80-minute drama is set in the Communist era of the early 1960s—a time when so much of the country’s turmoil and loss still had not been dealt with. When asked by Cinephiled’s Danny Miller if there is denial today about what happened to the country’s Jews during the war, the writer-director had this to say, “I think Poland is a very complicated society. It’s also a democratic society now so you’ll find people who are in total denial and others who are into digging everything up. I think there’s a healthy debate going on nowadays — this is not a country that’s sweeping anything under the carpet anymore.”
Ida is not based on a specific story. Pawlikowski told Indiewire’s Sydney Levine he “wanted to make a film about history that wouldnʼt feel like a historical film— a film that is moral, but has no lessons to offer.” Filmed in black-and-white, Ida does in fact seem to live in the gray, allowing moviegoers to decide what to take away from the movie. You can see Ida in Cleveland this week at Capitol and Cedar-Lee Theatres. If you go, I’d love to hear what you thought about the movie. —Sam Fryberger
