Poland Submits ‘The Peasants’ For Best International Feature Oscars Race

Poland has selected DK Welchman (formerly known as Dorota Kobiela) and Hugh Welchman’s The Peasants as its entry in the 2024 International Feature Oscars race.

The Welchmans are no strangers to awards season attention. Their 2017 film Loving Vincent won a European Film Award for best animated feature, the audience award at Annecy, and was nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe.

The Peasants beat out a strong field of live-action titles including Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border, which won seven awards at this year’s Biennale in Venice. The Polish selection committee’s decision didn’t come without a fair bit of controversy. Poland’s far-right government engaged in a concerted campaign against The Green Border, with some government officials comparing it to “Nazi propaganda” for its depiction of the refugee crisis on Poland’s border with Belarus.

Here’s what we know about The Peasants:

• Synopsis: Jagna is a young woman determined to forge her own path within the confines of a late 19th-century Polish village – a hotbed of gossip and ongoing feuds, held together, rich and poor, by pride in their land, adherence to colorful 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.
• The Peasants is a Poland-Serbia-Lithuania co-production between Digitalkraft, Art. Shot, Breakthru Films, Canal + Polska, Narodowy Centrum Kultury, Mazowiecki Instytut Kultury, and SKP Ślusarek Kubiak Pieczyk.
• The film was shot in live-action and then rotoscoped using the oil painting technique that the Welchmans used for Loving Vincent. Piotr Dominiak was head of paint animation.