"This is my return to the Poland I love" - Filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski on IDA

After winning countless awards at international film festivals, including the main prize at the 2013 BFI London Film Festival where the film first premiered, Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida bagged - within the space of a little over a week - five of the European Film Awards including Best European Film and the 2014 Lux Prize, the latter being the highest award given to a film by the European Parliament. To think, this time last year it seemed like Ida would be an ultimate work of introverted humility that despite carrying the name of a hugely celebrated filmmaker like Pawlikowski might have disappeared among the hoard of festival films. Ida is an ultimate success story of recent European cinema, and now inevitably even one of the favourites for the upcoming edition of the Academy Awards.
 
Ida is the story of the titular character, a woman who is soon to become a Catholic nun, orphan of the Stalinist rule in Poland, who discovers her Jewish heritage and meets for the first time her aunt Wanda, who unlike her niece is a tough female and was a powerful figure during the Communist years as well as one that was known as being particularly merciless in her role as a judge. The meeting between these two women leads them down a meditative and psychological journey and a road trip to visit the place where Ida's parents were killed, encountering different situations and people along the way. The interview was conducted at the 71st Venice Film Festival earlier in the year, in occasion of the screening of the three finalist films for this year's edition of the LUX Prize. You can listen to the full interview on FRED Film Radio by clicking here.

MATT MICUCCI: After years of activities in UK cinemas, Ida marks a return to your native Poland for you.

PAWEL PAWLIKOWSKI: Yes, it does, and it seemed like suddenly I felt the urge to return. In fact, the main source of inspiration for me was making a film that would take me back to Poland, a Poland I love, the Poland from the early sixties, with its music, its faces and its landscape still steeped in disaster and still marked by Stalinism but also full of a new energy, new possibilities and with its new and varied cultures emerging. But of course, aside from that, it was a number of elements that made these films come together - it's never just one. So, I always had this idea in the back of my head of developing a character that was a Catholic nun who discovered her being of Jewish stock, because I thought this would offer interesting grounds to develop examinations of different matters regarding religion and spirituality and whether it's something tribal, socially defining or transcendental. At the same time, for the other lead character of Wanda, I thought about a woman who would have been very young - in her teens or early twenties - when she lived through the years of the war and in the Communist underground and who afterwards became nothing short of a murderer under Stalin's rule. So when Stalin goes, she loses her power, her sense of direction, and she is stuck.

 

MM:  Is there a difference to you in dealing with this type of issues and cultural examinations through the story of two leading female characters, as opposed to leading male figures?

PP: Well, to me it's more like I find female characters generally more interesting and more rewarding. In fact, I often work more with female leading character than male leading characters. I think part of the reason why is because I'm a man, and men are like me, so women for me are something to discover. I mean, they're not that different from men, but to me they still retain a type of mysteriousness. And of course, women are great actors. In fact, the girl who plays Ida [Agata Trzebuchowska] never acted in her life. She was a student in Warsaw University and never dreamt of acting. We just spotted her in a cafè, and she was great. And I love that kind of thing, I think it's much more interesting than seeing the same faces on the big screen.

 

MM: One of the things this film is praised for is the unusual and exciting cinematography and visual style. How did the idea for it come to you?

PP: Generally speaking, I always envisioned it in a 3:4 format and in black and white, to give it a box-like feeling. On top of that, I never wanted the camera to move too much, and to make the film feel less cinematic and more like a meditation. This type of cinematography is actually rather simple and not too elaborate or distracting, but it has character and carries this feeling of timeless meditation. The framing, of course, is opened up - the faces are off centre and there is a lot more of the sky in the shots. Basically, it's a new way of looking at things, it's not digging in the usual cinematic bag of tricks. It's more about creating the best way possible to bring the story to the big screen without overdoing it in a way that is particularly important in relating the characters and their faces to the landscape.

 

Listen to the full interview on FRED Film Radio by clicking here.