For Your Consideration... Ida

Last month, the Polish co-production (also produced by Denmark, France, and the UK, with support from the Council of Europe film fund, Eurimages) Ida, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, took home the 2015 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 87^th Academy Awards. Ida beat out one of the favorites, Russia’s Levithian, as well as Mali’s first and only Oscar nominee to date, Timbuktu.

Ida is a very artistic film, reminiscent of the style of many European films from the 1960s (as the movie is set in the same time period). Instead of showing a scene in a straight-forward frame, this movie uses extremely daring camera angles…many scenes are crooked, characters are not centered and their faces and bodies are awkwardly cut off in many frames, and settings, such as staircases, take the camera’s focus away from what is actually happening. If you are looking for very artsy direction, this is probably the film for you. It’s also in black & white, adding an extra ounce of avant garde in case you needed more. However, I will say that the black & white helps set the mood for the
                                                             drab and depressing tone of post-WWII Poland.

 

Apart from the visual aspect, Ida tells the story of Ida, a young woman who is preparing to become a nun. Before she takes her final vows, she is told that she should learn about her roots first. Ida and her only surviving relative, her aunt, a communist judge, go on a journey to rediscover a haunting past and what unknowingly led Ida to become part of the Catholic Church in the first place.

One of the artistic liberties Ida takes with a staircase.

Ida touches on many post-war European values and experiences, most of the reason why I believe this film got so much acclaim. Living in the Polish People’s Republic, a satellite to the Soviet Union, not even twenty years after the end of World War II, Ida loses her past, as she never had the opportunity to learn about it, amidst all the violence and displacement. As a viewer, you can feel the sorrow that exists in these characters’ worlds and you get to experience what they are learning about themselves for the first time. Ida meets people from with complicated pasts and blurry futures as she is discovering her own past and trying to reconcile her future.