Cold War

Paweł Pawlikowski's Cold War arrived in 2018, four years after his Ida, and confirmed him as the most distinctive Polish auteur of his generation. The film won Best Director at Cannes 2018 and three Academy Award nominations including Best Director, the first foreign-language film since Michael Haneke's Amour to be nominated in that category. It is loosely based on the romantic history of Pawlikowski's own parents.

Across fifteen years and multiple borders (from the folk-music ensembles of Stalinist Poland in the late 1940s, to West Berlin, Paris jazz clubs of the late 1950s, and back behind the Iron Curtain) pianist Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and singer Zula (Joanna Kulig) fall in and out of a love that they are unable to either complete or abandon. Łukasz Żal's black-and-white Academy-ratio cinematography, the meticulous period reconstruction of Polish folk music transformed into communist propaganda, and Kulig's combustible central performance combine into one of the great recent European romances.

The film is structured as a series of ellipses, months and years dropped between scenes, leaving the audience to infer what has happened. The technique forces the central love affair into a kind of myth-time. Pawlikowski has spoken of the film as loosely autobiographical, drawing on the fractious romantic history of his own parents (both also called Wiktor and Zula) across the same Cold War decades. Żal's 1.37:1 black-and-white cinematography drew an Oscar nomination, while the Mazowsze ensemble served as the historical model for the fictional Mazurek folk troupe at the film's centre.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: A masterclass in compression, eighty-eight minutes that contain the emotional weight of a four-hour epic. One of the very few contemporary films that earns the comparison to Casablanca.