IDA

Filmed in incandescent black-and-white, with each frame exquisitely composed, UK-based director Pawel Pawlikowski’s (My Summer of Love, Last Resort) new film is an elegy for his homeland and an intimate, poetic exploration of the limits of faith. Orphaned during WWII, Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) was brought up in a rural convent and in early 60s Poland is a young novice preparing to take her vows. When she decides to make contact with her last remaining relative, she meets her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a free-living intellectual working as a judge and secretly annihilating painful memories with a heady mix of sex and booze. Their encounter lifts the shroud off the dark secret of their family’s past and both women must confront the devastating truth. Both actresses are superb and reveal much with what they do not show, but this pure and haunting concept is also true of the film’s cogent and profoundly moving narrative.