This afternoon my wife and I saw and really enjoyed the movie Cold War, (Zimna wojna) by director Pawel Pawlikowski (he also co-wrote the screenplay), which tells the story of two Polish lovers—loosely based on Pawlikowski's parents—who connect, separate, wind up on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain and, after several more connection-separation iterations, ultimately reunite.
It swept the European film awards (five awards in the six major categories for which it was nominated), and is a U.S. Motion Picture Academy Awards candidate for best director, cinematography, and foreign-language film. (It's in Polish.)
Its photographic style is stark and it's in black-and-white, which somehow seems appropriate for depicting a sequence of historical segments between the 1940s and the 1960s.
But what really impressed me was that this is one of the few movies I can recall where I didn't think the director wasted a single scene. Pawlikowski told a reporter for The New Yorker that his spare cinematic style is based on asking, "what is necessary here?"
I don't shoot video, but that strikes me as a useful standard to employ for anyone who is culling images.
