The Peasants (Chłopi) is a breathtakingly unique cinematic experience: a fully painted animated film that brings the early 20th-century Polish countryside to life with the vivid texture of an oil painting. Directed by DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, the film adapts Władysław Reymont’s Nobel Prize-winning novel into a richly visual tale of land, power, and a woman’s place within a rigid rural community.

🎬 The Peasants	ℹ Movie Details
Country	Poland
📅 Year	2023
🎭 Genre	Drama, Historical, Animation
⏳ Runtime	114 min
🎬 Director	DK Welchman, Hugh Welchman
⭐ Main Actors	Kamila Urzędowska, Robert Gulaczyk, Mirosław Baka

At the heart of the film is Jagna, a young woman caught between her own desires and the suffocating expectations of a patriarchal society. Her tragic journey unfolds with a painterly intensity—each frame a living canvas, echoing the style of turn-of-the-century realist masters. What results is not only a narrative about social roles and control, but also a meditation on the cycles of nature, labor, and longing.

The animation technique is extraordinary. Using the same oil-paint-over-footage method seen in Loving Vincent, the filmmakers craft a world that feels timeless, dreamlike, and painfully tangible. Every scene breathes with the seasons—lush fields in summer, brutal snowstorms in winter—and every emotion is heightened by the raw texture of the painted surface.

The film’s strength lies in its contrasts. The beauty of the visuals is juxtaposed with the harshness of peasant life and the cruelty of collective judgment. Jagna’s struggle is not just personal, but emblematic of the tension between individuality and conformity, desire and duty.

This is not just a historical story—it’s a folk tragedy, an operatic portrayal of gendered violence disguised under communal order. The Peasants doesn’t moralize, it observes. The land is fertile, but the culture is punishing.

The score—haunting, earthy, and poetic—enhances the folkloric tone of the film, reinforcing its rhythm and timelessness. And yet, despite its rural setting and century-old source, its themes remain disturbingly relevant.

The Peasants is a bold, unconventional work of art. It blends literature, painting, and cinema to explore how beauty can coexist with brutality, and how traditions—when left unquestioned—can quietly destroy those who live under them.