CINEOS Premiere

Ida

A young novice about to take her vows learns she is Jewish and goes looking for her family's wartime grave — and finds a question no faith can close.

Pawlikowski keeps everything still and withheld — Ida's face a closed surface, the frame pinning both women to the bottom beneath a vast black sky — so the film's arguments are made in composition and silence rather than speech. The beauty creates a surface calm the material never lets you trust, and the grief is sealed rather than released. What stays is a sedimentary heaviness and a final image that reinstalls itself unbidden for days.