Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: The Peasants

An experiment of replacing craftspeople, necessary in most film productions, with an entourage of artists, The Peasants is a pictorially impeccable film. Artistic partners (and married duo) DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, who delivered the only other film even moderately similar to this one in 2017’s Loving Vincent, labored a hard four years on their newest film, and every one of the 200,000 hours of work put into the film is left on the screen. The Peasants is the best film this writer has seen in 2023, and even among the very best of the decade.

The filmmaking process for The Peasants‘ story, adapted from Władysław Reymont’s novel (original title: Chłopi), is a complex one. First, the co-directors filmed an entire live-action feature with actors. Then, as was the case with Loving Vincent, a small army of artists worked for years oil painting the frames using the live-action footage for reference. But as the directors mention in their interview with Letterboxd, the keyframes for their new film took nearly five hours each because of their complexity; as a point of reference, Loving Vincent’s frames averaged out to “just” two and a half hours. Understandably, instead of having the 125 painters create 12 frames per second like with their first film, the Welchmans here use the magic of computer animation artists (and not artificial intelligence) to compensate between keyframes, which gives their new film a stronger sense of free-ranging motion. And if that weren’t enough, the multi-national production was interrupted by both the Covid pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the animators at MOREFILM studio in Kyiv were under threat of perish. (The filmmakers apparently helped many of their animators escape the war; others stayed and worked through it.) The result of all this work is unparalleled in vision and execution, the popping colors swimming into each other almost as if in lost in a dance that never ends.

Continue reading at In Review Online.