According to Tolstoy, a village is its own world; if you observe and depict the events within the village properly, you can approach a universal truth applicable anywhere, anytime. Following their successful oil painting animation Loving Vincent (2017), which recreated Van Gogh’s style on screen, the acclaimed duo DK Welchman (née Dorota Kobiela) and Hugh Welchman now bring Nobel Prize-winning novel The Peasants to the cinema. The painstaking process of adding color and texture to thousands of frames shot in live-action to depict the changing seasons of a 19th-century Polish village landscape in Lipce was delayed due to the pandemic and war, and was eventually completed with great effort. While the extensive novel spans over a thousand pages, condensing it into a two-hour runtime involved reconfiguring the story around the central character of the beautiful virgin Jagna. Nevertheless, all conflicts within the film stem from a desire for land, and every action taken by the characters ultimately becomes a struggle to attain land. When Jagna vehemently resists the order and conventions that sustained the village for so long, the emergence of ruptures of chaos within that world is undeniably intriguing. (Karen PARK)