Foreign critics praise the film’s artistic value. Patrick McGavin from Chicago gives the following rationale for picking Ida as one of the best 2014 pictures: “The austere black and white photography achieves a deft, eerie likeness to newsreel, especially the cold, almost medieval architecture and the empty landscapes. (…) Ida is about two forms of horror collapsing against each other, the abuses perpetrated during the war framed against the privation of post-war Communism.”

Sheila O’Malley, a New York-based critic who ranked Ida as the best 2014 film, adds: “Ida is one of those miraculous films where the images on the screen are so startling, so unique, so themselves, that the visuals take on a whole subterranean level of meaning, coursing beneath the actual plot.”

“The world is enthralled by the story about a choice made by a young girl and about what drives her to such a choice. It’s very intimate cinema, close to itself, modest and honest. The film is so well-liked abroad because it takes a very close picture of man,” says Maja Staniszewska, a film critic of the Metro daily. She adds that Ida’s strength lies in understatement: “It’s appealing that the viewer guesses the story; works it out from bits of conversations. It’s an artistic movie; honest, moving and subtle cinema that has resonated well among foreign audiences just because of its subtlety and understatement,” thinks Ms Staniszewska.

“I was sure that Ida was going for an Oscar,” Dr Michał Oleszczyk, artistic director of the Gdynia Film Festival, film expert and critic, tells Polska.pl. “It’s a film that can be liked for a number of reasons: first, it presents the complexity of Poland’s 20th century history in a clear and lucid way, using the road movie convention; second, it starts off with a brilliant idea: a Jewish nun and Stalinist female prosecutor represent a classic example of the so-called odd couple, which is based on contrasts. Third, the film’s form alludes to the cinema of the 1960s, evoking nostalgia for different times, in the same vein as Peter Bogdanovich once did, for example, in his Paper Moon and the Last Picture Show,” explains Mr Oleszczyk.

Ida has been nominated for an American Academy Award in two categories: for best foreign language movie and for photography by Łukasz Żal and Ryszard Lenczewski. Before that, it was showered with awards at European and international film festivals, wining over 100 prizes, including a Goya Award, dubbed a Spanish equivalent of the Oscar, and a British Oscar—a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award.

Other Polish nominations in 2015

Two documentary shorts nominated for Oscars, Joanna and Our Curse, both based on true events previously described on blogs, recount the intimate experiences of modern Poles. None of them, unfortunately, was honoured with the Academy Award.

Our Curse is the story of little Leo, born with an incurable disease—the Ondine’s curse. The boy requires lifetime mechanical ventillation during sleep otherwise he will stop breathing. Leo is the son of the film’s director, Tomasz Śliwiński. He and his wife, Magda Hueckel, describe the everyday struggle for the boy’s life on a blog. It was the parents’ decision to make a film about Leo. They wanted to show other parents of terminally-ill children that they are not alone in their fight.

Aneta Kopacz’s Joanna tells the story of Joanna Sałyga, a beneficiary of the Rak’n’Roll foundation, a woman who described her struggle with cancer on a very popular blog called Headscarf. The film shows the woman’s last holidays spent with her husband and son. It tackles the challenging topic of life and death in a very tactful and sensitive manner. ”It is not an easy task to find an astonishing story for a documentary. It is even more difficult to tell it in a movie. Yet, the most difficult part is to get so close to the protagonists of our story as if they were our nearest and dearest. In order to achieve this, a great heart is needed, which is exactly what Aneta Kopacz showed in her movie Joanna,” said Andrzej Wajda, winner of an Oscar for lifetime achievement, who co-produced the film, alongside Wojciech Markowski of Wajda Studio and Michał Merczyński, the director of the Polish National Audiovisual Institute. The film’s director of photography is Łukasz Żal, nominated for the Oscar in the Best Cinematography category for his work in Ida. The original score was composed by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek, who won an Oscar in 2005 for the music in Finding Neverland.

According to Tadeusz Sobolewski, Gazeta Wyborcza’s film critic, the nominations for Polish documentary films, a genre that has been neglected and scarcely founded in our country in recent years, prove the outstanding artistic level of Polish filmmakers.

The nomination for Anna Biedrzycka-Sheppard (shared with Jane Clive) for best costumes in Richard Stromberg’s Maleficent starring Angelina Jolie can also be called a “Polish” one. The 69-year-old Polish costume designer has been nominated twice before: in 1994, for Schindler’s List and in 2003, for the Pianist.

KAROLINA KOWALSKA, MAGDALENA MAJEWSKA