“Ida,” a Polish film about a Catholic woman who discovers she is the Jewish child of Holocaust victims, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski collected the Oscar at the 87th annual Academy Awards Ceremony Sunday night in Los Angeles. The spare black-and-white drama, set in Poland in 1962, won…
Every year since 1963, Poland has submitted a movie for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Nine of the country’s past submissions have been shortlisted for the prize, and 2015 marks the 10th: “Ida,” a black-and-white film about a Polish nun (Agata Trzebuchowska) who discovers she is Jewish and that her parents were…
The Israeli entry is out, but a Polish Holocaust-related film is still in the running, as movies from nine countries were shortlisted Friday in the Oscars race for best foreign-language film. “Gett: The Trial of Vivian Amsalem,” Israel’s entry, did not make the cut. The film depicts the five-year legal struggle of an Orthodox wife…
“Ida,” a fascinating and disquieting Polish language film written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, is a post-Soviet Polish rumination, a mystery with religious and political overtones. Pronounced as “Eeda,” Pawlikowski told me during our chat: “I needed a good name and remembered the Jewish Polish actress Ida Kaminska. It was a name I liked, but…
Shot in rich black and white, “Ida” is a quiet, deliberately paced study of the end of innocence for a young Polish woman, Anna, raised an orphan in a convent. It is the early 1960s. On the verge of taking her vows, the Mother Superior tells Anna that her only living relative, an aunt, wants…
Pawel Pawlikowski left Poland at the age of 14, but his childhood memories of his homeland never left him. It’s no surprise then that “Ida,” a stunning portrait of two very different women whose lives intersect in 1960s Poland, is the director’s most assured and confident narrative feature yet. The film takes place in the…
In his classic 1988 account of Hollywood’s Jewish roots, ‘“An Empire of Their Own,” Neal Gabler argued convincingly that Hollywood (and therefore, world cinema as we know it) would not exist today without the contributions of the Jewish pioneers and studio heads who first turned movies into our country’s great popular art form. But if…
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