Poland, 1962. Anna, an orphan brought up by nuns in the convent, is a novice. She she discovers a dark family secret dating back to the years of the Nazi occupation.
Nestled within its sins-of-the-elders narrative is a faintly charming cross-generational bonding picture, pairing a worldly cynic with a young girl taking her last gasp of secular air before giving her life to the Lord.
Now that Paweł Pawlikowski's haunting Polish film has been nominated for a foreign-language Oscar, Ida is back in the conversation. Let yourself be enveloped by a modern cinema classic.
Ida is not only an evocation of early '60s Poland, the period of Pawlikowski's childhood, but a film that gives the illusion that it could have been made then.
