A FILM co-produced by Fugard Theatre founder Eric Abraham, from Cape Town, has won an Oscar for best foreign language film at the 87th Academy Awards in Los Angeles.
The movie Ida is the second Academy Award for Abraham after he won the golden statuette for his film Kolya in 1996.
Ida is a black-and-white film directed by Pawel Pawlikowski and written by him and Rebecca Lenkiewicz. It has earned Pawlikowski his first Oscar and is the first Polish foreign language film to win the coveted prize.
A delighted Abraham said: “It’s wonderful when the underdog triumphs. A small short black-and-white film in Polish, Ida, seems to have touched people across the barriers of language and culture in over 30 countries so far. It restores my faith in the appetite for films that make us think and feel about the human condition. South Africa has so many such stories waiting to be told on film.”
Ida stars Agata Kulesza, Dawid Ogrodnik and Agata Trzebuchowska. It is set in Poland in 1962, and 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 ll, she must 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 “penetrate the darkest, thorniest thickets of Polish history, reckoning with the crimes of Stalinism and the Holocaust”.
Aside from winning numerous awards in Poland, Ida was selected as Best Film of 2014 by the European Film Academy and as Best Film Not in the English Language of 2014 by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
The Star