Orphaned as an infant during the German occupation of World War II, she must meet her aunt, a former Communist state prosecutor and only surviving relative, who tells her that her parents were Jewish.

Hailed as a "compact masterpiece" and an "eerily beautiful road movie", the film has also been said to "contain a cosmos of guilt, violence and pain", even if certain historical events (German occupation of Poland, the Holocaust and Stalinism) remain unsaid: "none of this is stated, but all of it is built, so to speak, into the atmosphere: the country feels dead, the population sparse".

[9] In the 1960s Poland, Anna, a young novice nun, is told by her prioress that she must visit Wanda Gruz, her aunt and only surviving relative, before she takes her vows.

Anna travels to Warsaw to see Wanda, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, sexually promiscuous state prosecutor and former communist resistance fighter.

Wanda reveals that Anna's actual name is Ida Lebenstein, and that she was raised in a convent after her Jewish parents were murdered late in the German occupation during World War II.

On the way to their hotel, Wanda picks up a hitchhiker, Lis, an alto saxophone player who is performing a gig in the same town.

Instead, he agrees to tell them where the Lebensteins are buried if Ida promises to leave the Skibas alone and give up any claim to the house and land.

Wanda and Ida take the bones to their family plot in an abandoned, overgrown Jewish cemetery in Lublin, and bury them.

The next morning, Ida quietly arises without awakening Lis, dons her habit again, and leaves, presumably to return to the convent and take her vows.

One notorious example of these led to the 1953 execution of brigadier general Emil August Fieldorf, a famed resistance fighter in the Home Army.

[17] Pawlikowski met her in the 1980s in England, where she'd emigrated in 1971; he's said of her that "I couldn't square the warm, ironic woman I knew with the ruthless fanatic and Stalinist hangman.

After he'd interviewed more than 400 actresses, Agata Trzebuchowska was discovered by a friend of Pawlikowski's, who saw her sitting in a cafe in Warsaw reading a book.

"[19] Lenczewski has commented that, "We chose black and white and the 1.33 frame because it was evocative of Polish films of that era, the early 1960s.

"[23] After its initial festival screenings, Ida premiered in Poland on 25 October 2013, followed by releases in various other countries in the subsequent months, including France, Spain, Italy, and New Zealand.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Empathetically written, splendidly acted, and beautifully photographed, Ida finds director Pawel Pawlikowski revisiting his roots to powerful effect.

[30] A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote that "with breathtaking concision and clarity—80 minutes of austere, carefully framed black and white—Mr.

Pawlikowski penetrates the darkest, thorniest thickets of Polish history, reckoning with the crimes of Stalinism and the Holocaust.

"[5] David Denby of The New Yorker called Ida a "compact masterpiece", and he discussed the film's reticence concerning the history in which it is embedded: "Between 1939 and 1945, Poland lost a fifth of its population, including three million Jews.

Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian that "Agata Trzebuchowska is tremendously mysterious as a 17-year-old novitiate in a remote convent: she has the impassivity and inscrutability of youth.

"[4] Riva Reardon wrote, "In her debut role, the actress masterfully negotiates the film's challenging subtlety, offering glimpses into her character with only a slight movement of the corner of her mouth or by simply shifting her uncanny black eyes.

"[34] David Denby noted that "Wanda tells her of her past in brief fragments, and Kulesza does more with those fragments—adding a gesture, a pause—than anyone since Greta Garbo, who always implied much more than she said.

"[3] Dana Stevens wrote that "As played, stupendously, by the veteran Polish TV, stage, and film actress Agata Kulesza, Wanda is a vortex of a character, as fascinating to spend time with as she is bottomlessly sad.

[37] Eric Abraham, one of the producers of Ida, responded: "Are they really suggesting that all films loosely based on historical events should come with contextual captions?

"[46] Dana Stevens writes that Ida is "set in the early 1960s, and its stylistic austerity and interest in theological questions often recall the work of Robert Bresson (though Pawlikowski lacks—I think—Bresson's deeply held faith in salvation).

[51] Earning nearly as much as it did in the United States, the film grossed $3,192,706 in France, where it reached its peak presence in 270 theaters and ran for 46 weeks.

[54] Among other festivals Ida won Best Film at Gdynia, Warsaw, London, Bydgoszcz, Minsk, Gijón, Wiesbaden, Kraków.

[7] The Spanish Academy of Arts and Cinematographic Sciences named Ida as Best European Film at the 29th Goya Awards.