Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Ida 2014

This film is shot in gloomy b/w. Ida, now in her twenties, a Polish Jew by birth, raised in a convent, is about to be formally inducted as a nun. She sets out to discover her past with help from her sole surviving relative, Her family was murdered, apparently for their house., She locates the burial site, digs out the bones, to inter them with some respect, a symbolic act of love for her parents she never saw. She has no taste for a normal life, and walks back to the convent. The film has an autumnal beauty, resonating with the memory of the terrible past. The tall tree trunks, mute witnesses, are shrouded in mist, the houses squalid and the restaurants swept by gloomy jazz. How quickly the world changes! The dream of the holocaust followed by Stalin has receded, like past plagues.