In a film with little dialogue and fewer than a dozen characters, director Pawel Pawlikowski does a remarkable job portraying Poland’s complex and fragmented memory of World War II, the Holocaust and the post-war government. Ida follows a young girl as she unravels the threads of the many perspectives that existed in Poland in the early 1960s and decides which ones to weave into her own identity.

The film begins with Anna, a novice at a Catholic convent in the countryside, about to take her vows and become a nun. The Mother Superior orders her to visit her last remaining relative, an aunt, before she makes her final decision. Wanda Gruz opens the door of an untidy apartment filled with cigarette smoke and empty liquor bottles. Once a scantily clad man has removed himself to the bathroom, she informs her niece that her name is not Anna but Ida, and that her family is Jewish.

These first few scenes explore the post-war identity of the Polish Catholic church and the remainder of the Jewish population, and reflect on the magnitude of the damage each suffered during the war. Particularly in the areas of Poland annexed by Germany, the Catholic clergy was persecuted  and many convents were closed. Ida shows a convent in disrepair, yet still standing, as the nuns go about their lives much as they did before the war. While the convent may be damaged, Wanda Gruz’s entire way of life is destroyed. Agata Trzebuchowska’s portray of ‘Red’ Wanda, former Soviet prosecutor and dedicated communist, reveals a lonely, disillusioned, and conflicted character.  When Ida appears on her doorstep, her memories of the Jewish community’s fate come rushing back and she begins to relive the pain of her past.

As Ida and Wanda investigate the fate of Ida’s parents, Pawlikowski confronts the troubled relationship between Polish Jews and their Christian neighbors during the Nazi occupation. It is left up to the viewer to decide why the man who was hiding Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son suddenly turned on them and killed them. The man, Feliks, now living in the home of Ida’s parents, displays signs of deep-seated guilt over his part in the death of the previous owners. However, when Feliks makes a deal with Ida to show her her parents’ final resting place, he makes a clear reference to one incentive that caused Poles to turn on their Jewish neighbors: lust for their wealth. In exchange for letting Ida say a final farewell to her parents, he extracts a promise from her never to make a claim on her parents’ property. In spite of his apparent shame and regret, he still falls victim to the same prejudice and greed that likely caused him to become a murderer years before.

Both Feliks’ confession in the graveyard and Wanda’s abrupt suicide bring to the surface the painful process of remembering the terror of wartime. Feliks and Wanda have both blocked out the past and moved on with their lives, only to have their memories brought back to haunt them years later by Ida. Ida also struggles to regain a sense of herself after discovering the split in her identity caused by the war. When she returns to the convent with the intention of taking her vows, she is unable to put aside what she has discovered, and no longer feels ready to become a nun. It is only after a few wild days of high heels, liquor, and intimacy that she feels she has made peace with the part of herself that giggles in the silence of a convent mealtime. All these realizations parallel the conflicts and pain present in Poland even today, as the past continues to resurface and challenge the beliefs of the descendants of an entire generation: Jews, Catholics, and former Communists alike.

Ida gives such complexity to its few characters that it is able to tell many stories and fully express that people can be both good and evil in a myriad of combinations. The film forces the viewer to judge the motivations of the characters through pure observation. We must rely on facial expressions, movements, and whispers instead of dialogue. Those who lived through the war staked their lives on fragmented information, and similarly Ida does not present the viewer with clarity about whom to trust, whom to hate, and whom to love.

Ida is an extraordinary film because of the realistic and understandable way it tells such a complex story. Condensing Polish memory of World War II into 82 minutes and making it accessible to audiences outside Poland is no small task. Every element of the film and every second of the screenplay further the impact of the story. The black and white color scheme, the stationary camera, and the two hairpins holding the wisps of Ida’s hair out of sight under her habit are all imbued with the same question. A question that Poland is still asking as we move into the 21st century: What happened here, and what does it mean for me?