Making a film in his homeland for the very first time after building an international reputation with the acclaimed British films LAST RESORT and MY SUMMER OF LOVE, Polish auteur Pawel Pawlikowski has created a spare, stark, and beautifully directed drama that explores one of his country's most fraught, controversial and emotionally charged issues: the relations between Polish Catholics and Jews during the Nazi occupation. In the early 1960s, the young novitiate nun Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is about to take her vows, until a visit to her middle-aged aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza)—a former state prosecutor now reduced to the position of lowly rural magistrate—reveals a long-buried family secret. The two women undertake a journey to the countryside that doubles as a voyage into the past, into both the horrors of war and the iron-fisted autocracy that succeeded it. Gorgeously shot in black and white and using the 1.37:1 Academy ratio (the almost-square frame of classical cinema), IDA is "a poignant story powerfully told.... tender and bleak, funny and sad, superbly photographed in luminous monochrome: a sort of neo-new wave movie with something of the classic Polish film school and something of Truffaut, but also deadpan flecks of Béla Tarr and Aki Kaurismäki," writes Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian. (Synopsis courtesy of the Toronto International Film Festival)

"A film of exceptional artistry whose emotions are as potent and persuasive as its images are indelibly beautiful." —Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

“Richly sympathetic and deeply moving!  First-timer Agata Trzebuchowska is quietly compelling.” —Tom Huddleston, Time Out