‘The Peasants’ Director On How The Production Had To Battle Through The Ukraine War & Covid — Contenders Film L.A.
18.11.2023 - 20:37
/ deadline.com
The Peasants would already be a daunting project in the best of times. Like their previous film, Loving Vincent, directors Hugh and DK Welchman oversaw a team of animators painting each frame of the film based on live-action reference material. Hugh, who came to Los Angeles from Poland just for his 12-minute Contenders panel, said The Peasants also had to work around COVID and the Ukraine War.
Between the pandemic and the war, The Peasants — which is Poland’s entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar — faced difficulty getting all of their painters in the same room.
“We can’t do stuff remotely,” Hugh said. “We have people sitting in front of easels with a whole lighting setup in each of the painting animation workstations.”
The Peasants recruited painters from Poland, Serbia, Lithuania and Ukraine and faced 20 percent inflation over the years of production. The Ukraine war cut much of the film’s staff in half.
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“We bought tickets for all the women, because the men were all of military age so they couldn’t leave,” he said. “All the women came to the border. They were with their elderly mothers or their children. We had to find them places to live, places for their kids to go to school.”
The Peasants was ultimately able to open their studio in Kyiv, but did not have consistent electricity.
“Our painters would work for an hour and a half and then sit their reading by candlelight for the next five hours waiting for the electricity to come back on,” he said.
Ultimately, the Welchmans sold some Loving Vincent paintings and launched a Kickstarter to buy a generator.
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