EXCLUSIVE: Oscar-nominated bio-pic Loving Vincent made history in 2017 as the first feature-length, fully hand-painted animation, drawing six million cinema spectators worldwide and grossing more than $42 million at the global box office.
The creative duo behind the ground-breaking work – DK Welchman (previously known as Dorota Kobiela) and Hugh Welchman – are putting the final touches to their follow-up work The Peasants.
Deadline can reveal a first teaser courtesy of production company BreathThru Films and New Europe Film Sales.
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Adapted from Władysław Reymont’s classic novel, The Peasants tells the story of Jagna, a young woman determined to forge her own path within the confines of a late 19th century Polish village – a hotbed of gossip and on-going feuds, held together, rich and poor, by pride in their land, adherence to colourful traditions and a deep-rooted patriarchy.
When Jagna finds herself caught between the conflicting desires of the village’s richest farmer, his eldest son and other leading men of the community, her resistance puts her on a tragic collision course with the community around her.
Like its predecessor, The Peasants is animated in oil-paints by hand, but director DK Welchman says the new film is far more ambitious.
“The scale of the two films is incomparable. Loving Vincent is an intimate film, with a lot of static scenes and dialogue. The Peasants is much more spectacular. There are breath-taking dance scenes and even a pitched battle,” she explained.
“These scenes are extremely dynamic scenes, with the camera following the characters, and flying into the heart of the action. To make the first fully oil painting animated film (Loving Vincent) we had to come up with a raft of cinematic and technical innovations, but The Peasants sets the bar much higher.”
The Peasants was shot as a feature film with a Polish cast led by the upcoming actress Kamila Urzędowska as Jagna, with other actors including Mirosław Baka, Ewa Kasprzyk, Andrzej Konopka, Sonia Bohosiewicz, Małgorzata Kożuchowska, Robert Gulaczyk, Maciej Musiał, Dorota Stalińska and Julia Wieniawa.
“It was important to cast Jagna not only as “the most beautiful girl in Lipce” (name of the village from the novel) but a person with a free-spirit, youthful exuberance and a sense of mystery. And that’s what we saw in Kamila Urzędowska”, said BreakThru Film CEO and producer Sean Bobbitt.
More than 90 painters in four studios in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Serbia animated on canvas with oil-paints. To date, the artists have painted for more than 180 000 hours. For the paintings, they used Cobra paints from Royal Talens: water-soluble oil-paints, making them much more ecologically friendly and also healthier for the painters than regular oil paints.
The creative team of The Peasants includes Radosław Ładczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale, The Hater); DoPs Kamil Polak and Szymon Kuriata; costume designer Katarzyna Lewinska (EO, The Lure, The Silent Twins) and set designer Elwira Pluta.
The head of the paint animation is Piotr Dominiak, while Lukasz Mackiewicz and Michal Janicki were in charge of post-production.
The film’s distributor in Poland is Next Film. The film is scheduled for national theatrical release in October 2023.
As previously announced New Europe Film Sales has sold the movie to over 40 countries, including German-speaking Europe (Plaion), France (The Jokers), Benelux (Paradiso), South Korea (First Run), China (JL Film), Scandinavia (Another World Entertainment) and Spain (Karma). The company is in negotiations with buyers in the U.K. and North America, Australia and Japan, where rights remain open.
Reymont’s epic novel, for which he received the Nobel Prize, is considered the most credible chronicle of the Polish peasant community ever written. The novel has recently been newly translated and published by Penguin Classics.
“Reymont painted in words, and we paint the film in the aesthetic of his contemporaries from the Young Poland movement, to which Reymont also belonged. The big screen will feature interpretations of works by artists such as Józef Chelmonski, Ferdynand Ruszczyc, and Julian Fałat,” DK Welchman explained.