Ida, a film co-produced by Eric Abraham – owner and founding producer of the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town – has recently won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. This is the second Academy Award for Abraham after his 1996 win for his film Kolya.
A black and white film directed by Paweł Pawlikowski and written by him and Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Ida has earned Pawlikowski his first Oscar and is the first Polish foreign language film to win the coveted prize. Accepting the award, Pawlikowski thanked Abraham and all those involved in the making and success of the film.
Ida is set in Poland in 1962 and stars Agata Kulesza, Dawid Ogrodnik and Agata Trzebuchowska. The film 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 now meet her aunt. 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.
Ida was also 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 (BAFTA).
Speaking from Los Angeles, Eric Abraham said,”…It’s wonderful when the underdog triumphs… Ida seems to have touched people across the barriers of language and culture in over thirty countries so far and 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”.
The Fugard Theatre will be the first theatre in Africa to screen this Ida, on Saturday 21 March 2015.
Source: The Fugard website.
