Paweł Pawlikowski’s new feature Cold War, which won him Best Director in Cannes, ends with a dedication to his parents. The film plays like a love letter to their generation of Poles — not one composed through rose-tinted glasses, but in recognition of emotional lives squandered under the weight of material circumstance and harsh socio-political forces. As nostalgic as it is coolly cynical, the film spans more than a decade and conjures for one last dance a vision of Europe just emerging from the war. At its erratically beating heart are pianist and composer Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and singer-dancer Zula (Joanna Kulig), whose affair stops and starts on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and who are loosely based on the director’s mother and father. “I think of communist Poland as a very hard time, but it was also the time of Paweł’s childhood,” says Kot when we meet in Czech spa town Karlovy Vary, where Cold War is screening at the International Film Festival. “He was able somehow to create a romantic story amid it all,” he says of the film’s blend of beauty and clear-eyed bitterness.

We’re seated in a suite inside the Grandhotel Pupp, which has been an institution for centuries, known for its old-world charm and a popular movie location in its own right. Kot has shed his role, apologising self-consciously for his halting English amid a cheery greeting that carries none of the restrained, enigmatic, cigarette-smoking intensity of his Cold War character. Still, the actor’s conventional, chiselled handsomeness is striking — a look that compelled Pawlikowski to cast him. “He told me I have a very classical face, as if I was born before the war,” he says (the director, meanwhile, asked his co-star Joanna Kulig to look back for inspiration to Parisian siren Jeanne Moreau). This throwback to screen stars of old befits a film that, like Pawlikowski’s previous, Oscar-winning Ida (which also had director of photography Łukasz Żal and production designers Katarzyna Sobanska and Marcel Slawinski on board), is shot in gorgeous black-and-white monochrome, every frame perfectly, almost obsessively composed. Kot recalls that Pawlikowski would detail items he remembered from his early years to be found for the set to recreate the times as vividly as possible. “I started to think that he is a painter and I am a part of his painting,” he says.