The Peasants

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The movie, like Reymont's novel, is divided into four parts corresponding to each of the four seasons. It takes place at the turn of the twentieth century, over the course of one year, in the village of Lipce. More than 90 painters in four studios in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Serbia animated on canvas with oil-paints. To date, the artists have painted for more than 180 000 hours. For the paintings, they used Cobra paints from Royal Talens: water-soluble oil-paints, making them much more ecologically friendly and also healthier for the painters than regular oil paints.

An established translator of Polish literature, Anna Zaranko was born in the UK to Polish parents. The 2023 Found in Translation Award marks her second award of this kind. In 2020 she received the award for her translation of The Memoir of an Anti-hero by Kornel Filipowicz. Zaranko’s translation approaches this language with a light touch, utilising colourful informal speech that avoids any reliance on British dialects, while still retaining its northern rhythm at times.” Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont (7 May 1867 – 5 December 1925) was a Polish novelist and the 1924 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best known for his four-volume epic The Peasants( Chlopi), which was original published between 1904 and 1909 . Land is a major theme in the novel such that the fields themselves are elevated to an almost sacred level, with the apogee of success and happiness in the eyes of the novel’s characters being to own at least a small piece of the farmland. The novel, for which Reymont received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1924, is a fictional tale set during the late 19th century in the village of Lipce in Congress Poland — a part of the country under Russian control at the time.

Hundreds of thousands take to the streets across Britain

The score is by Łukasz Rostkowski [3] (aka "L.U.C."), a Polish MC, rapper, activist, and music producer based in Wrocław. [5] As founder of the international Rebel Babel Ensemble [6] (aka Rebel Babel Film Orchestra), he has created a "Multimedia concert" with Rebel Babel for the film. [7] The score will be released on November 3, 2023. [8] 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine impact [ edit ] Continuing, she added: “Zaranko’s approach not only makes the original text accessible to contemporary readers but also helps to maintain its authenticity. The film was produced using the painted animation technique over the production of five years, similar to the Welchman duo's previous film, Loving Vincent. [2] Initially the film was shot with the actors, and then more than a hundred painters in four studios in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Serbia painted oil paintings based on the shots, which became frames in the film. Animators then worked to supplement the paintings to make the whole film seamless. The artists spent over 200,000 hours in total working on the project. [3] It is now available in English translation by Anna Zaranko, the first English tranalation since 1924.

a b "The Peasants world premiere on Toronto International Film Festival". Film in Serbia. 28 July 2023 . Retrieved 1 August 2023. Grobar, Matt (29 September 2023). "Sony Pictures Classics Acquires Polish Oscar Entry 'The Peasants' From 'Loving Vincent' Filmmakers". Deadline Hollywood . Retrieved 29 September 2023. The English translation of Reymont’s work evokes a writing style akin to that of English novelist Thomas Hardy. Reymont’s vivid and detailed depictions of the novel’s numerous characters, the village and events such as baptisms, marriages, funerals and local fairs bring Lipce and its residents to life.Ursula Phillips, a British translator of Polish literature said in her review of The Peasants: “One of the notable aspects of the novel is the ‘peasant-speak’ language created by the author, which does not reflect any dialect spoken in rural Poland. Lipce’s peasants, many of whom are illiterate and struggling to survive a harsh winter, care little about Polish independence.

Weiner, Yitzi (18 January 2023). "Music stars making a social impact: Why & how Łukasz LUC Rostkowski of Rebel Babel Ensemble is helping to change our world". Medium . Retrieved 1 August 2023. But The Peasants is not a Disney animated film. That’s because artists then entered the artistic process for hand painting oil on canvas. Significantly, they did not trace over live-action photographic images as if in traditional rotoscoping. Instead, they had a picture overhead for reference as they did an entirely original painting on canvas. Naturalism - a style of art or writing that shows people, things and experiences as they really are. In the book naturalism is used to present everyday life. The most famous fragment of the book when naturalism is shown is when Jakub – the farmhand - is cutting his leg. Reymont’s work covers themes including peasant exploitation — we see the greatest exploitation is carried out by wealthy peasants owning small tracts of land against landless residents of Lipce (including sometimes their poorer relations) who are forced to earn a living as hired hands or beggars. To do that, the filmmakers turned to a wide repertoire of realist and pre-Impressionist paintings, drawing from the work of artists from the Young Poland movement, a modernist period roughly spanning the years from 1890-1918. They were equally inspired by the evocative language of the novel itself, which “reads like a painting” in its vivid, descriptive passages, according to Hugh.I also found the level of antisemitism disconcerting. A Jewish tavern-keeper is an agent of evil in the plot. But he is only one of several such agents, so I can accept that. It wasn't so easy to accept frequent use of the term, "Jew", in a pejorative sense. The novel's setting was destined to be the center of the Holocaust only 15 years later, so the antisemitism was a fact of life in that time and place. The film features works from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, with an emphasis on Young Poland artists. It includes interpretations of works by artists such as Józef Chełmoński, Ferdynand Ruszczyc and Leon Wyczółkowski. [2] Józef Chełmoński's works used in a film include the following: [ citation needed] Nussen, Greg (28 September 2023). "Polish Film Festival 2023: Kos, Next to Nothing, The Peasants, Imago, Anxiety, & More". Slant Magazine . Retrieved 9 October 2023.