Ayr Film Society continues its season this Thursday (September 24) with IDA.

Set in an austere, almost abandoned Poland during the early 1960s, director Pawel Pawlikowski’s first feature made in his homeland is a spare, haunting piece of minimalism, opening in silence on a black-and-white close-up of a young novice.

If this convent-set overture primes us to expect a meditation on faith what we get is both far simpler and even more profound, a still water that runs unspeakably deep.

Anna has been raised in the convent where she was abandoned as a baby. She has never known anywhere else. Now 18 and about to take her vows, she is ordered by her Mother Superior to visit Lódź, and the aunt whose existence was hitherto unknown to her.

The woman she meets, Wanda, is hard-faced and hard-drinking, simmering with contempt for the world. She taunts Anna about her faith and reveals that she is in fact Jewish: “A Jewish nun,” she snorts.

Anna’s real name, Wanda tells her, is Ida (pronounced Ee-da) and her parents were killed during WWII.

These revelations lead to a sad, small road trip through the bleak Polish countryside to find out what happened to Anna’s parents. As the two women travel through ghostly villages and across shorn fields into the Stalinist architecture of Lódź and Szydłów, a history very delicately, almost silently, unfolds. The details are sparse, the narrative laconic to say the least.

But we don’t need to know the intricacies of Poland’s political past to feel that there is something rotten in the air. Places are empty, people shifty. Ida is shot in hard-focus black-and-white but leaves the impression that even in colour this land would seem pale, bled of life.

This is a place where stained glass, usually such a source of illumination, is but an impenetrable collection of semi-opaque shapes. This is ultimately not a film about finding salvation through belief, and at its end we can’t be sure where Anna is going. Crafted with deceptive simplicity, riven with uncertainty, Ida has no answers to the questions it raises about how we protect ourselves and our loved ones from the burdens of the past, nor how we move forward.

But its indelible images are a stark reminder that film itself is a kind of miracle. (Catherine Wheatley (Sight & Sound)) The screening, at Ayr Town Hall is 7pm for 7.30pm Tickets are £5 at the door (£3 students) or £55 for the season.