In Ida a virginal teenager who’s been raised in a Polish convent since her infancy is summoned by the mother superior and informed that, before she takes her vows of ordination to become a nun, she must travel to the city and meet her only living relative, an aunt who refused to take her in after her parents died. Poland is still under communist rule in the mid-60s, and the aunt is a powerful magistrate known for sentencing enemies of the state to death (“Red Wanda,” people call her). From this embittered and alcoholic woman, the young novitiate learns that her real name is Ida Lebenstein, that her father was Jewish, and that her mother perished alongside him during the Nazi occupation; together Ida and Wanda set off for the little village of Piaski to learn where the parents are buried and how they met their fate. Wanda cautions Ida before they leave: “What if you go there and discover there is no God?”
The buried history of Polish complicity in the Holocaust has become a hot-button issue in a nation accustomed to its victimhood: a storm of controversy greeted the 2001 publication of Neighbors, Jan T. Gross’s nonfiction book about the Jedwabne pogrom—in which some 300 Jews were butchered by their fellow townspeople—and the 2012 release of Aftermath, Wladyslaw Pasikowki’s dramatic feature based on the same incident. As a longtime expatriate, Pawel Pawlikowski may not understand just how sensitive his fellow Poles are on the subject, yet Ida transpires on a level far removed from the political forces of nationalism or fascism or communism. It tells a story of simple good and evil, and how an innocent young woman comes to know herself better as she grows more intimately acquainted with each.
Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski
