Sony Pictures Acquires Polish Oscar Pick ‘The Peasants,’ Plans Awards Push

Sony Pictures Classics (SPC) has secured rights in North America, Latin America, the Middle East, and Australia/New Zealand to Poland’s international feature Oscar submission The Peasants, the second animated feature from Loving Vincent filmmakers DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman.

According to SPC and the filmmaking duo, the distributor will be submitting The Peasants to this year’s animated feature race and giving it an awards-season push, although no theatrical release dates were provided with the acquisition announcement.

This is SPC’s second European animated pickup of the year, after They Shot the Piano Player from Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal. Both films were directed by filmmakers whose previous features were nominated for Oscars.

Film details:

• The Peasants is based on the same-named early 20th-century novel by Polish author Władysław Reymont. It 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 ongoing feuds, held together by pride, adherence to colorful traditions, and 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 film 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 in association with New Europe Film Sales and Carte Blanche, and with the support of Polish Film Institute, Film Center Serbia, and Lithuanian Film Center. It was co-financed by The Polish National Foundation and financed by funds from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage.
• The Peasants 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, and more than 100 painters worked on the film.
• In a release, the Welchmans said: “100 years ago, Reymont, an author little known outside of Poland, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and his book traveled to over 100 countries worldwide. We hope our adaptation of his book, The Peasants, brought to life in oil-painting animation, will similarly reach out and touch audiences around the globe and, like he did, find award success too.”