Ida and Neighbors are arguably both complimentary and stand alone pieces. As compliments of each other, Ida’s story continues the timeline of events initiated in the story told in Neighbors. While Neighbors directly, and sometimes gruesomely educates readers of the physical horrors and torture that Jewish population at Jedwabne experienced, Ida follows up on the story and reveals to viewers that event’s aftermath did not end when the flames died out or last cries of victims’ agony were heard. By the end of the film, Ida is caught between two worlds; conflicted between a life with and without her nun’s habit. She staggers between two identities, one she once recognized without question, and other she never before contemplated. Neighbors’ Poles are arguably morphed to inflictors of violence that they most likely once did not want to be. Ida’s Feliks, once a murderous Pole, lives a relatively hidden and quiet life, but when Wanda, Ida’s aunt, seeks him out and reminds him of his violent past, he crumbles as well. Both Ida and Neighbors tell stories of individuals’ psychological and physical torment surrounding the events and aftermath of 1940s Poland.

Although Ida’s story focuses on the turmoil that ancestors of Jewish lost loved ones in World War II face, Ida’s personal story and journey throughout the film, involves both an identity epiphany and crisis. Anna, happily soon to be Catholic nun, suddenly becomes Ida a Jewish survivor of Polish violence in the Second World War. Naively happy in the convent, Ida’s world is suddenly shaken and stirred by her alcoholic, chain smoking aunt Wanda; a once famous prosecutor. After Wanda’s death, Ida takes pause and removes her nun’s habit for a night, experiencing what life would be like without a vow to God, but a vow to a husband and family (her epiphany that happiness does not have to come from a lifelong commitment to God). However, in the end, Ida dons the habit once again, but is no longer the same. Now caught between religious and secular, devout and sinful, Catholic and Jewish, Ida walks jarringly towards an unsatisfying life, cut off from the outside world and all the pain, but also love that it has to offer. Ida is between black and white, one life or the other, but are either of those lives as simple as black or white? What happens if to those that have experienced both worlds, like Ida; how are they went to chose one without ever being reminded of or tempted by the other?