IDA / IDA

A convent in Poland in the early 1960s. The novice Anna is about to take her vows. At the insistence of the abbess the young woman sets out for the city to visit her only living relative, her deceased mother’s sister. Next to each other the two women are like chalk and cheese. Anna is placid, unworldly, but firm with it. Her aunt Wanda is hard, forthright, changes her lovers not infrequently, enjoys a drink. As a judge in the post-war years she was dubbed “Red Wanda”, notorious for her harsh sentences. But Anna’s visit makes Wanda delve even further back in the past. She reveals that during German occupation her niece was born to Jewish parents subsequently murdered in the Holocaust. Anna learns that her real name is Ida Lebenstein. She wants to see the family grave, and the pair of them set off on a journey at the end of which they will each make a decision with momentous consequences for their lives. IDA is a Polish road movie of the different kind. Narrated in breathtaking black-and-white images, swept along by the reduced yet intense acting of the two protagonists, and resonating, for all the tragedy, with a certain lightness and the seductive sound of jazz.
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PAWEŁ PAWLIKOWSKI
Born 1957 in Warsaw, Poland.
Left Poland at the age of 14, and spent several years in Germany and Italy. He has lived in the UK since 1977. While studying literature and philosophy at Oxford, he made documentaries for the BBC, among them FROM MOSCOW TO PIETUSHKI / MOSCOW CIRCLES: YEROFEYEV (1989/91). He swapped to fiction with his first telefilm, TWOCKERS (1998), which was followed by LAST RESORT (2000) and MY SUMMER OF LOVE (2004), for which he respectively received a BAFTA Award and international festival prizes.

FILMOGRAPHY (SELECTION)
2000 / LAST RESORT
2004 / MY SUMMER OF LOVE
2011 / THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH
2013 / IDA