Ida is a 2013 Polish
drama film directed by
Pawel Pawlikowski and written by Pawlikowski and
Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Set in Poland in 1962, it is about a young woman on the verge of taking vows as a Catholic nun. Orphaned as an infant during the
German occupation of World War II, she must now meet her aunt. The former Communist state prosecutor and only surviving relative tells her that her parents were Jewish. The two women embark on a road trip into the Polish countryside to learn the fate of their family. Called a "compact masterpiece" and an "eerily beautiful road movie", the film has also been said to "contain a cosmos of guilt, violence and pain", even if certain historical events (
German occupation of Poland, the
Holocaust and
Stalinism) remain unsaid: "none of this is stated, but all of it is built, so to speak, into the atmosphere: the country feels dead, the population sparse".