Trailer
Plot summary
Jagna Paczesiówna lives in the village of Lipce and is skilled at making cutouts. She is having an affair with Antek Boryna, whose wife, Hanka, struggles to accept his adultery. Antek's father, Maciej Boryna, is a widower and the village's wealthiest farmer. He decides to remarry and chooses Jagna, offering her six acres of land as a dowry. Jagna's mother, Dominikowa, welcomes the match, but Antek and Hanka are against it.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Peasants (2023)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- When Russia's invasion closed the Kyiv animation studio MOREFILM, run by producers Olga Zhurzhenko and Desniana Rozhkova, overnight in February 2022, the film's producers moved as many Ukrainian artists as possible to Poland to keep working, and in August 2022 BreakThru Films helped relaunch the studio, giving work to fifteen painters and staff.
- During the bombings and power cuts that began in Ukraine in October 2022, the film's painters scheduled their work around the outages, waiting in the cold when the electricity was out, and in late autumn BreakThru Films crowdfunded a power generator so they could keep painting.
- After the film was shot with its actors, more than a hundred painters in four studios in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Serbia painted oil paintings based on the shots to become the film's frames; in all, the artists spent over 200,000 hours on the project.
- The Peasants drew over 141,000 admissions in its opening weekend, the biggest for a Polish film in 2023, beating Agnieszka Holland's Green Border, and by 30 October 2023 it had become the most popular Polish release of 2023.
- The film's painted frames include interpretations of real turn-of-the-20th-century Polish art, with an emphasis on Young Poland painters such as Józef Chełmoński, Ferdynand Ruszczyc and Leon Wyczółkowski.
