Ida (2014)

Wonderful character development!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Scenography and pictures are well done, and it rescue movie form compleat disaster. Sadly there is nothing more positive one could say anles is politically motivated. It is another take after "Poklosie" (Aftermath -2012) weak and sad piece of misrepresentation of historical facts. Story is told without balance and proportion that should come when dealing with this kind of narreative. So like in "Aftermath". Again complex polish - jewish relationsships, are clumsily flattened into plot in with younger generation discovers mords committed by polish peasants on their neighbors during WWII. There is so little content in that movie, and so much time waisted, that could be used to educate american audience, like to speak out the true, about brutal german occupation, that was far worse from what countires in west europe had. Instead we have long minutes of looks in the eyes, and quiet and seedy speak. Simply boring. I'm not sure how much the problem was lack of proper budget, or if it was simply shaped to deliver product that would be supported by american jews.

I had high hopes for this movie as this movie won an Oscar. However it doesn't deserve it. There were hundreds of movies that year which should have won it. It is shockingly boring, too short and too slow. Not to mention that the whole story is an insult to Polish efforts for saving jews from German occupied Poland. Poland was the only country during ww2 that didn't collaborate with either Germans of Russians. According to Wikipedia Estimates the number of Poles involved in rescue at up to 3 million, and credit Poles with saving up to around 450,000 Jews from certain death.The rescue efforts were aided by one of the largest anti-Nazi resistance movements in Europe, the Polish Underground State and its military arm, the Armia Krajowa. Supported by the Polish government-in-exile, these organizations operated special units dedicated to helping Jews; of those, the most notable was Żegota Council based in Warsaw with branches in Kraków, Wilno and Lwów.Polish citizens were hampered by the most extreme conditions in all of German-occupied Europe. Occupied Poland was the only territory where the Germans decreed that any kind of help for Jews was punishable by death for the helper and their entire family. Of the estimated 3 million non-Jewish Poles killed in World War II, up to 50,000 were executed by Nazi Germany solely as penalty for saving Jews.After the War most of this information was suppressed by the Soviet-installed satellite regime in an attempt to discredit Polish prewar society and its wartime government as reactionary.

I'd read a lot about Ida and it has taken me until now to catch up with it. I am so glad I did.This is the first work of director Pawel Pawlikowski that I have seen, and he has crafted a masterpiece.It is a movie set in the very stark times of 60's Poland, and its black and white theme set the scene magnificently, as I'm pretty sure a lot of others who remember that time period will agree. (Although not familiar with Poland, I spent some time in communist East Germany in the 60s and 70s, and the scene felt very familiar to me).I found all of the characters very real, even the most minor of them, and my only small criticism would be Ida's lack of any kind of emotion upon learning that she is Jewish, despite having spent her whole life in a Catholic convent.The story unfolds in an unremarkable, but believable way as its two major characters meet and begin to bond, regardless of their differences, chalk and cheese, but related by blood, one of them very much of the world and scarred by events from the past, and the other young and innocent, and alive almost by chance. Together they set out to find out the whole truth.This could and probably should, have been the most depressing of stories based as it is upon events which probably did occur from time to time during the second world war. But its intimacy draws the viewer into the heart of the story and its outcome.For one of the characters the whole truth is too much to bear. For the other, having sampled life outside in the world for a short while, we seem to be led to believe, returns to her cloistered life, the one she has always known.

Poland, like the rest of Europe, has made movies focusing on its experience under Nazi occupation. Paweł Pawlikowski's "Ida" looks at a young woman about to take her vows in 1962 who discovers that she was born a Jew. She proceeds to try and find out the whole story.The movie drew criticism from various factions in Poland. One allegation is that it depicts the Poles as willing collaborators with the Nazis. Another is that it portrays Jews as willing collaborators with the Soviet-backed regime. I'd say that a better description is that it shows how there were different kinds of people in both eras. Just as there were Poles who aided the Nazis, there were Poles who helped the Jews. Just as there were people who collaborated with Moscow's puppets, there were people who resisted it.The point is, this is a very well made movie. The black-and-white cinematography emphasizes the existence that people lived in 1960s Poland, a combination of the Nazis' atrocities from twenty years earlier (including the leveling of Warsaw) and the Soviet-backed regime's atrocities. It was appropriate that this was Poland's first winner of Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, along with a number of other awards. I highly recommend the movie, and I hope to see more movies from this director.