Ida

Ida is a 2013 drama film directed by Paweł Pawlikowski and written by Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Set in Poland in 1962, it follows a young woman on the verge of taking vows as a Catholic nun. Orphaned as an infant during the German occupation of World War II, she must meet her aunt, a former Communist state prosecutor and only surviving relative, who tells her that her parents were Jewish. The two women embark on a road trip into the Polish countryside to learn the fate of their relatives. Hailed as a "compact masterpiece" and an "eerily beautiful road movie", the film has also been said to "contain a cosmos of guilt, violence and pain", even if certain historical events (German occupation of Poland, the Holocaust and Stalinism) remain unsaid: "none of this is stated, but all of it is built, so to speak, into the atmosphere: the country feels dead, the population sparse". Ida won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, becoming the first Polish film to do so. It had earlier been selected as Best Film of 2014 by the European Film Academy and as Best Film Not in the English Language of 2014 by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). In 2016, the film was named as the 55th best film of the 21st century, from a poll of 177 film critics from around the world. Plot In the 1960s Polish People's Republic, Anna, a young novice nun, is told by her prioress that before she takes her final vows, she must visit her aunt, Wanda Gruz, who is her only surviving relative. Anna travels to Warsaw to visit her aunt Wanda, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, sexually promiscuous judge who reveals that Anna's actual name is Ida Lebenstein; Ida's parents had been Jews who were murdered late in the German occupation of Poland during World War II (1939–45). Ida, after being orphaned, was raised by nuns in a convent. Wanda, who had been a Communist resistance fighter against the German occupation, became the state prosecutor "Red Wanda" who sent "men to their deaths".