Ida(2013)
dir. Paweł Pawlikowski
A novice learns she is Jewish, and what her town hid.
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Poland, 1962. Anna is a novice about to take her vows when the mother superior sends her to meet her only living relative, her aunt Wanda, a hard-drinking former state prosecutor. Wanda tells her she is Jewish and that her real name is Ida, and the two women drive into the countryside to find out what happened to her parents. It is shot in black and white, in 82 minutes.
Why it’s here
The film puts Polish complicity in the Holocaust on screen through a quiet road movie. What's punk is Wanda, who once sentenced people for the state and now has to live with it. What's pedagogical is how it handles guilt, memory and what a country hides. Pairs with Number the Stars and Everything is Illuminated.
Where This Film Lives
- Setting
- Poland • Europe • Eastern Europe
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
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Ferdydurke
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Mother Night
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Nazi propagandist. American spy. Both true. One man.
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The Captive Mind
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How smart people talk themselves into serving tyranny.
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The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
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The only comic to win the Pulitzer. Banned anyway.
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The Librarian of Auschwitz
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Eight books. One library. One defiant act.
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The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
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Six weeks in 1937 that the world filed away.
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