Extraordinary b/w cinematography in Polish film Ida

The 2013 Polish film Ida should definitely has a shot at the foreign-language Oscar, for which it's nominated. It's a pretty simple, almost stark narrative, sent in a remote area of Poland circa 196655. It opens with novices in a monastery, scenes almost in silence except for the prayers; the mother superior tells one of the novitiates she has to visit her estranged aunt before she can take her vows; against her will, the young woman goes to visit her aunt, who informs her that she was born a Jew (named Ida) and that her family had been killed during the war. The two - very different characters, Ida shy and saintly, the aunt a stern judge with a serious drinking problem and a promiscuous streak - set off to the village where Ida's parents hid during the war to learn what they can about the wartime fate of her family. In a way, it's a journey of discovery; in a way, it's a road-trip buddy movie; in another way, it's about Ida's grappling with her faith and trying to determine the course to take in live: secular or religious, in the world or withdrawn from the world. Despite a few plot aspects that are opaque at least to non-Polish viewers (how did Ida's aunt avoid the assault on the Jews?, for example), the story line is simple and has a few surprising twists. What makes this movie exceptional, however, is the extraordinarily beautiful cinematography - all in b/w, capturing the look and feel, I imagine, of Poland in the darkest years of postwar poverty and communist rule - the impoverished countryside, the drab cities, the freezing cold austerity of the monastery, the cheesiness of a "tourist" hotel with a trashy nightclub that seemed 20 years removed from the music scene of the West. The look of the movie recalled for me the stark beauty of Nebraska, though not filmed in wide-angle, or some of the beautiful b/w films from Italy in the early days - but with a crispness and image clarity that would not have been possible in that era.