The Peasants

Reymont’s Nobel-winning novel, brought to the screen not filmed but painted — shot in live action, rebuilt shot by shot in visual effects, then hand-painted in oil, frame by frame, until every image on screen is a living canvas.

From DK & Hugh Welchman — the duo behind the Oscar-nominated Loving Vincent — The Peasants follows Jagna, a young woman fighting to forge her own path in a late-19th-century Polish village bound by tradition, gossip and a deep-rooted patriarchy. It became Poland’s official entry for Best International Feature at the 96th Academy Awards, and one of the most ambitious animation undertakings ever attempted: over five years, four painting studios across Poland, Serbia, Lithuania and Ukraine, and more than a hundred painters producing tens of thousands of oil canvases.

~80,000 frames painted
200,000+ hours of work
4 studios Poland · Serbia · Lithuania · Ukraine
5 years in the making

Unlike a conventional animation, The Peasants begins as a film. Performances were shot in live action — half on set, half on greenscreen, the village itself part-built in cardboard and metal because it would ultimately be repainted. DigitalKraft, a co-producer on the film, worked at the stage where that raw footage becomes an image worth painting: compositing and grading each plate, extending sets, and building the CG layers — weather, background figures and animals — that the painters would later interpret in oil. This composited, effects-laden frame isn’t the destination; it’s the reference the artists paint from.

From there, the work leaves the computer and returns to canvas. Rather than trace the footage, painters kept each composited shot on a screen as reference and painted an entirely new oil rendering of it — adding brushwork, texture, skies and motion blur, in the palette of Young Poland masters like Józef Chełmoński. In DigitalKraft’s Serbian studio — seventeen painters, two supervisors and an assistant, led by painting supervisor and key-frame artist Biserka Petrović — artists lived inside single shots for months, at times painting Jagna’s eyelashes with a brush cut down to a single hair.

he final challenge was motion. Because every frame is an independent painting, a separate effort was needed to knit them into fluid movement — interpolating between canvases and preserving detail so that thousands of still oil paintings resolve into continuous, believable motion. The result sits somewhere between live action, animation and a gallery of moving paintings — a form its makers call “oilscope.”

Since premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Peasants has swept international festivals and awards and stood as Poland’s Academy Awards entry for Best International Feature — a five-year act of collective painting in which DigitalKraft helped carry each shot from live plate to finished canvas.