IDA
_UNDERSCORE: The Living Tradition of Polish Cinema
•
1h 18m
Poland/Denmark
Poland, 1962. Anna is a beautiful eighteen-year-old woman, preparing to become a nun at the convent where she has lived since orphaned as a child. She learns she has a living relative she must visit before taking her vows, her mother’s sister Wanda.
Together, the two women embark on a voyage of discovery of each other and their past. Her aunt, she learns is not only a former hard-line Communist state prosecutor notorious for sentencing priests and others to death, but also a Jew. Anna learns that she too is Jewish - and that her real name is Ida. This revelation sets Anna, now Ida, on a journey to uncover her roots and confront the truth about her family.
Ida has to choose between her birth identity and the religion that saved her from the massacres of the Nazi occupation of Poland. And Wanda must confront decisions she made during the War when she chose loyalty to the cause before family.
Directed by: Paweł Pawlikowski
Written by: Paweł Pawlikowski, Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Produced by: Eric Abraham, Ewa Puszczyńska, Piotr Dzięcioł
Cinematography: Łukasz Żal, Ryszard Lenczewski
Editing: Jarosław Kamiński
Production Design: Katarzyna Sobańska, Marcel Sławiński
Costume Design: Aleksandra Staszko
Sound: Claus Lynge, Andreas Kongsgaard
Original Score: Kristian Selin Eidnes Andersen
Cast: Agata Kulesza (Wanda), Agata Trzebuchowska (Anna), Dawid Ogrodnik (Lis), Jerzy Trela (Szymon), Adam Szyszkowski (Feliks)
Statement of the director:
IDA is a film about identity, family, faith, guilt, socialism and music. I wanted to make a film about history, which wouldn’t feel like a historical film; a film which is moral, but has no lessons to offer; I wanted to tell a story in which ‘everyone has their reasons’; a story closer to poetry than plot. Most of all, I wanted to steer clear of the usual rhetoric of the Polish cinema. The Poland in IDA is shown by an ‘outsider’ with no axe to grind, filtered through personal memory and emotion, the sounds and images of childhood …
World Sales/Press:
Portobello Film Sales
http://portobellofilmsales.com/
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