Won: Best Foreign Language Film, 2015 The current holder of the Academy Award for Foreign Language Film, Pawel Pawlikowski's - whose underseen, baffling the The Woman In The Fifth I've been unsuccessfully pushing on people since I first saw it - Ida is a bleak, spiritual affair, shot in resplendent monochrome and doused in sarcasm, tragedy, and brief moments of hopefulness. Ostensibly a road movie, the picture sees a young nun, Anna, on the verge of taking her vows. A stark revelation about her family's past, however, sees her set out on a journey to the Polish countryside to learn about their fate (the Nazi-occupation elements of said fate are never explicitly mentioned and are instead built into the film's atmosphere, so that the spaces in-between what's inferred become all the more powerful). The first Polish film to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Ida is generally considered an instant classic. It was nominated for one other Oscar on the night, for Lukasz Zal's and Ryszard Lenczewski's cinematography, which ultimately lost out to Emmanuel Lubezki's work on Birdman.
