Beyond ‘Ida’: Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cinema of Love, Faith & Exile

zimna_wojna_fotosy189.jpg, large, A still from ‘Cold War’, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, 2018. Pictured: Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot, photo: Łukasz Bąk / Kino Świat.

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The Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski combines stylistic refinement in his films with an almost shameless taste for melodrama, while interweaving philosophy with genre clichés. Though often associated with poetic dramas, he has also made outstanding documentaries and stark, profoundly realistic portrayals of Britain’s marginalised communities. As we eagerly await Paweł Pawlikowski’s next film, let’s take a closer look at his career and explore some of his lesser-known works.

After years of silence and two abandoned projects, Paweł Pawlikowski will soon make his return with a new film. Inspired by Colm Tóibín’s novel The Magician, the film tells the story of Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika’s journey through ravaged, post-war Germany. In Fatherland, Pawlikowski will once again take us to a divided Europe, a fractured world in which private life becomes a footnote to grand historical narratives. As we await the premiere, it’s worth asking who Paweł Pawlikowski is today. What lies behind the phrases used to describe him – ‘master of contemporary cinema’, ‘mystic of the silver screen’ and ‘great stylistic genius’? The answers may come as quite a surprise, and a return to the director’s earlier films reveals a consistent path and remarkable intellectual coherence in his creative endeavours thus far.

Cut down to size

The director’s film career has been full of paradoxes and surprises. How can one explain the fact that after arriving in the UK with his mother as a teenager, he was hailed as one of the rising stars of young British cinema just over a decade later? And that this filmmaker who specialises in documentaries is now recognised worldwide as a cinematic visionary and metaphysician?

There are, in fact, more contradictions. For instance, the reception of his films: those that were expected to be successful turned out to be box office flops, while those that stood no chance of success brought Pawlikowski awards, fame and industry recognition. The Woman in the Fifth, starring Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas, flew under the radar, while the low-budget docudrama Twockers, made in collaboration with Ian Duncan, delighted critics with its authenticity and cinematic energy. It may seem somewhat paradoxical that, after years of preparation, the director abandoned work on Limonov, a film about the Russian writer and political dissident Eduard Limonov, while Ida – during the making of which he asked himself, ‘What on earth am I doing? Who on earth is going to watch this?’ – won him an Oscar.

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Ida. Zwiastun

Pawlikowski’s public image is also somewhat enigmatic nowadays. The Oscar won by Ida and the international acclaim surrounding Cold War have meant that many now view Pawlikowski through the prism of these two films. Black-and-white cinematography, distinctive framing and a static camera which, contrary to cinematic trends, refuses to chase after the characters but instead records their on-screen presence in a dignified manner – all this has become the hallmark of Pawlikowski’s style. The same can be said for the themes of both films: ill-fated love, the pursuit of faith, and identity built upon Polish history, folklore, jazz and the culture of Poland under the communist regime. Both these films have become so deeply ingrained in our cinematic consciousness that they’ve eclipsed a broader view of the director’s career, diverting attention from his earlier, often outstanding, highly inspiring works.

For – and here lies the final paradox – while Pawlikowski is the most frequently awarded Polish director of the past fifteen years, he remains one of the least understood figures in our film industry. And yet, for decades, his films have been shaped by the same elements: literature, history and religion, which simultaneously form an autobiographical thread running through his work. Let us therefore examine the central themes that bind together this remarkably diverse and seemingly disjointed artistic output.

A literary man in a documentary world

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Serbian Epics

Although Pawlikowski usually creates original screenplays for his films, it’s hard to find a director in Polish cinema who is as highly educated and well-read. His path to cinema did not, in fact, lead directly through film school. Instead of directing, Pawlikowski studied literature and philosophy at Oxford University, intending to write a PhD thesis on Georg Trakl, an Austrian expressionist poet from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even when, in the mid-1980s, he caught the cinema bug thanks to BBC film workshops and gave up his academic career, he continued to tackle ‘literary’ themes in his television documentaries.

I’ve always believed that life is full of stories and characters that seem to have been lifted straight out of literature. That’s why, when I started making documentaries, they weren’t simple, factual stories that consisted of simply following people around. I always tried to impose a narrative on them,

he said in an interview published in The Guardian.

In his remarkable film From Moscow to Pietushki (1990), he travelled to Russia to depict the world described by the writer Venedikt Yerofeyev. However, rather than producing a biographical tribute or a documentary essay about the author, he created a melancholic, deliriously poetic tale of Russia.

He returned to a literary theme in his next documentary, Dostoevsky’s Travels (1991), the most ironic of his early films. Here, Pawlikowski’s camera followed the famous writer’s grandson, who had been invited by literary scholars to Germany to take part in an academic symposium dedicated to the author of The Idiot. By depicting the clash between a simple tram driver from Saint Petersburg and the sophisticated academic elite, Pawlikowski created a humorous documentary about a man trapped in a world he doesn’t understand. Forced to listen to abstruse intellectual ramblings, Pawlikowski’s protagonist dreams of bringing back a second-hand Mercedes from the West to impress his work colleagues. Pawlikowski’s film became a metaphor for a fractured world, which he also explored in his subsequent documentary films, including his most significant ones: Tripping with Zhirinovsky and the outstanding Serbian Epics, which portrays the Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadžić like Nero, reciting poems against the backdrop of Sarajevo under fire.

For Pawlikowski, literature also often provides direct inspiration for his cinematic journeys. His film My Summer of Love (2004), for example – a story about a romance between two young women from different social classes – was based on a novel by Helen Cross. And the film Fatherland, which is currently in production – the story of a journey undertaken by Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika through post-war Germany – takes as its starting point one of the plotlines from Colm Tóibín’s novel The Magician.

There have also been projects with literary connections that Pawlikowski abandoned in recent years for various reasons. Among them was Limonov, based on a novel by Emmanuel Carrère. It told the story of Edouard Limonov, whose identity transformed from a free-spirited traveller and libertarian striving to conquer the world of New York’s bohemia into a radical nationalist and founder of the National Bolshevik Party. Pawlikowski and Ben Hopkins worked on the film’s screenplay for years, only to eventually withdraw from the project and ‘hand it over’ to the Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov.

In the chasm

In Fatherland, Pawlikowski once again turns to literature as the starting point for a cinematic narrative and returns to one of his favourite themes – a world divided by historical processes. When seeking common themes in Pawlikowski’s work, it is precisely this subject that clearly stands out, linking the documentary films from the early days of the director’s career and his more recent, Oscar-winning films.

Paweł Pawlikowski's The Woman in the Fifth - Image Gallery

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Pawlikowski’s cinematic worlds are, in fact, internally fractured. He intentionally explores the rifts dividing societies, countries and cultures. In Dostoevsky’s Travels, he concealed beneath the guise of a comedic documentary a story about the clash between East and West, and between elites and the working class. He also explored the world of nationalistic divisions in Serbian Epics, a film in which he addressed national myths that both unite society and give rise to hatred.

He also portrayed fractured realities in his British films. In Twockers, a forty-minute-long docudrama, he told the story of a teenage car thief who one day steals a white dog from a vehicle. He thus exposed a lesser-known side of British reality and people who had been relegated by cinema to the margins of visibility. He did the same in his film Last Resort, released in 2000. It tells the story of a Russian immigrant who, together with her son, sets off on a journey to England to build a life there with her fiancé; eventually abandoned by him, she tries to obtain political asylum in the UK. Pawlikowski once again brought East and West together, depicting the plight of disenfranchised people who are suspended between two worlds to which they don’t fully belong. His personal experience of immigration meant that this story about maternal love pulsed with cinematic truth and earned him a BAFTA award for Most Promising Newcomer.

In historical modes

Pawlikowski has become a specialist at portraying characters trapped between worlds: between social classes and countries, between the past and the present. He constructs stories around conflict. In Ida, he contrasted a girl preparing to take religious vows with the sensuality of youth, while forcing her embittered atheist aunt into spaces marked by religion. In Cold War, meanwhile, he thrust an ill-fated couple onto the carousel of history, forcing them to drift apart and come together repeatedly while grappling with an unrelenting sense of alienation.

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ZIMNA WOJNA - oficjalny zwiastun filmu

In both these Oscar-winning films, Pawlikowski invoked his favourite protagonist – the everyday reality of communist Poland. He’d left Poland for the UK as a teenager, and years later returned to the land of his childhood, viewing it with nostalgia yet refusing to turn a blind eye to the brutality of that world. In an interview with Agata Trzebuchowska for Przekrój, he spoke about the historical and geographical scope of his films as follows:

There’s something evocative and epic about it. It was a time when history had a strong influence on people’s lives. Their values and attitudes were clearly defined – every decision carried weight and had serious consequences. You could believe in something, fall in love with someone, get involved in something, and then remain committed to it for a long time. Nowadays we’re overstimulated, overloaded by information. Our murky, fleeting reality is far less appealing from a dramaturgical point of view. Of course, this is a kind of escapism for me. It’s not a world in which I would like to live, but I enjoy inventing stories in it. It also visually intrigues me. The absence of superfluous colours and sounds creates a landscape in which I feel comfortable. In this silence, every sound is meaningful.

In his stories about communist Poland, Pawlikowski portrays a world in which political oppression gave rise to a longing for freedom (often returning to his fascination with jazz), old churches bore witness to historical events, and weeping willows evoked sentimental associations with the legacy of Chopin and Mickiewicz on the one hand while, on the other, serving as a scenic backdrop for dramatic tales of human lives torn apart by the cogs of historical events. Pawlikowski transformed this space into one of the film’s protagonists. Especially when – as in his film Cold War – he depicted characters torn between a comfortable life on the cobbled streets of Paris and the bleak and sad, yet intimate and familiar reality of bleak, communist-era Poland.

Pawlikowski is, after all, a true master when it comes to using cinematic space to construct metaphors and complex layers of meaning. In his film Twockers, the provincial reality of a small English town, inhabited by young people with no hope for a bright future, was brought to life through images of rundown suburbs that formed a prison for the teenage protagonist. Similarly, in My Summer of Love, empty wastelands and dilapidated churches – as Damian Jankowski wrote in Więź – became a symbolic space in which God doesn’t exist, but people still have a deep yearning for the absolute.

In Pawlikowski’s films, even emptiness becomes meaningful, and sometimes the props themselves become the central characters. He uses these objects to construct a prison-like world into which he repeatedly thrusts his protagonists.

Paweł Pawlikowski’s religion of love

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A still from ‘Ida’, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, 2013. Pictured: Agata Trzebuchowska, photo: CAP/NFS / Forum.

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Kadr z filmu "Ida" w reżyserii Pawła Pawlikowskiego, 2013. Na zdjęciu: Agata Trzebuchowska, fot. CAP/NFS / Forum

Caught between two worlds and forced to make dramatic choices, Pawlikowski’s characters seek an escape. The director presents them with two possible exits from their miserable predicament: love and the faith that it inspires. It’s love that proves to be a ray of hope for the Russian immigrant seeking asylum in Last Resort, while the teenage thief in Twockers tries to escape his own life for the sake of a pregnant girl from the local bar. It’s entirely for her sake that he starts working in a poultry slaughterhouse, and he writes passionate declarations of love for her in a notebook.

For Pawlikowski, love is one of the few paths leading to hope. It features in the lesbian-themed My Summer of Love, the metaphysical Ida, and the unapologetically melodramatic Cold War, for which the director drew inspiration from his own parents’ relationship – one marked by separation and reconciliation. He had previously been developing a similar story while working on a film about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes – another dysfunctional couple, madly in love yet constantly clashing with each other.

Faith, however, remains another source of hope. Pawlikowski is currently one of the most fascinating directors working in what might be called religious cinema. While most filmmakers avoid such themes, fearing their dogmatic tone and shallow metaphysics, the director of Ida repeatedly returns to questions about the nature of faith, the concepts of guilt and sacrifice, and God as an answer to personal turmoil. In an excellent interview with Damian Jankowski published in Więź, he said:

I have a profound need for faith and belief in the existence of the Absolute. I am terrified by the flood of information and the materialistic, hedonistic culture that surrounds us. I try to distance myself from it all as much as possible – at least in my films. In real life, it’s a bit more difficult.

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„Kino latem pachnące” – „Lato miłości” (2004’, 86’), reż. Paweł Pawlikowski

In his later films, Pawlikowski takes us on almost philosophical journeys. In Ida, for instance, he explores not only the concept of vocation, but above all the question of guilt and who should be able to mete out punishment for it. The characters in his films are condemned to their own personal fate – they serve as their own judges and executioners, passing verdicts on themselves for their own sins. The farmer who killed the main character’s family in Ida is never held legally accountable. But will he really remain unpunished? Will Aunt Wanda in Ida and the cynical communist played by Borys Szyc in Cold War eventually face the consequences of their cruelty?

There are no easy solutions here, nor cheap gratification. But there’s no impunity either; the film’s protagonists are their own harshest critics. Pawlikowski spoke about this frankly: ‘No one is entirely innocent, nor entirely guilty; this means that everyone has the potential for redemption. That, after all, is the essence of faith.’

When addressing the topic of faith, Pawlikowski perceives in it not only hope (the brother in My Summer of Love seeks refuge from addiction through faith), but also potential dangers. Indeed, in the documentary films Tripping with Zhirinovsky and Serbian Epics, he demonstrates how instrumentalised religion transforms into a dangerous tool in the hands of political and ideological manipulators, and faith can become a fertile breeding ground for hatred fuelled by nationalism. For Pawlikowski’s theological reflections are far from simplistic. After having enthusiastically read the works of Søren Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel in his youth, the director now weaves into the margins of his stories a narrative of faith as a path to true love. In his interview for Więź, he said: ‘Cold War is about the need for absolute love, which can truly only come from God. People usually try to find it in human relationships, but this leads to tragicomic situations.’

Pawlikowski poses questions to which he himself is unable to provide a definitive answer. He’s most interested in the fates of people trapped in limbo-like states between two worlds. And while Pawlikowski's Oscar-winning films, built on a distinctive aesthetic and unique lyricism, invite us to interpret his work precisely through the prism of his stylistic choices and vivid cinematic language, they’re impressive due to their diversity of themes, stylistic versatility, and intellectual coherence. Obsessive and exploratory, Pawlikowski’s work has become a chronicle of the dramatic struggle for identity. It is far more interesting than the attempts made by journalists to simplify, diminish or pigeonhole a director who continues to resist easy categorisation.

_{Originally written in Polish, Dec 2025, translated by Scotia Gilroy, May 2026}

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