Cold War

Cold War (Zimna wojna, 2018) is a Polish-French drama by Paweł Pawlikowski that you can watch online on iFILM. Shot in black-and-white Academy ratio, the film follows Wiktor and Zula across fifteen years and several countries — from Poland in 1949 to Paris in the early 1960s — as they find each other, lose each other, and keep circling back despite every reason not to. Tomasz Kot and Joanna Kulig carry the film almost entirely through glances and silences.

Wiktor runs a state folk ensemble tasked with preserving Polish village music; Zula is a young singer he notices at an audition. They fall into something that neither of them can name cleanly. When Wiktor defects to the West, she cannot follow — and what comes after is a string of near-reunions in Berlin, Belgrade, Paris, each one slightly broken by politics, jealousy, or the people they have become in the years apart.

Pawlikowski dedicated the film to his parents, whose relationship it loosely mirrors. At Cannes 2018, it took the Best Director prize; it then went on to compete for the Oscar in the international feature category. Eighty-four minutes. No wasted scenes. Stream Cold War (2018) online on iFILM.