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With Loving Vincent, the directors Dk and Hugh Welchman attempted something that had never been done before: to create and edit together 65,000 oil paintings into a feature-length film. The result—which was the labor of 125 painters and numerous actors over the course of six years—was a unique amalgam of flesh, paint, and animation that earned the duo one of the top prizes at Berlinale as well as an Academy Award nomination. But that painstaking process, didn’t discourage the couple one bit. On the contrary, it inspired them to test the limits of filmmaking once again, as their latest film, The Peasants (which not only entailed the same artistic problems but was also interrupted in production by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), unquestionably proves. Ahead of the January 26 release, the new trailer for Poland’s Oscar entry has now arrived.

Adapted from Władysław Reymont’s beloved four-volume novel of the same name,...

Rotoscope-style animation gives this version of Władysław Reymont’s story an interesting look, but the performances and tone can’t live up to the visuals

Husband-and-wife film-makers Dk Welchman (née Dorota Kobiela) and Hugh Welchman made a real impression five years ago with their animation Loving Vincent, made in a pastiche style of Van Gogh’s own paintings using digital techniques to enhance hand-painted original work – a bit like the rotoscope approach of computer animation pioneer Bob Sabiston. A single-joke or single-idea movie, perhaps, but certainly interesting. Now, to some acclaim, they have done the same thing to the 1904-09 novel The Peasants by Nobel prizewinner Władysław Reymont (first adapted for Polish TV in the early 70s).

There’s the same digi-painted world derived from live action, the same visual effect of the forms and details on screen seeming always imperceptibly to throb or rustle, like a field of corn.

New-made furniture, scuffed to look vintage, rarely convinces as anything other than pastiche. Portraits painted as closely as possible to resemble the photographs on which they’re based are a similarly strange phenomenon: admiration for the painter’s skill is undercut by the sense of creative constraint. For the same reasons “The Peasants,” on which married directors Dk and Hugh Welchman apply the technique — of hand-painting over live-action frames — that brought them breakout success with Van Gogh biopic “Loving Vincent,” is a film that impresses in its painstaking, years-long construction, without ever really supplying a reason (beyond prettiness) for such a laborious aesthetic.

To fully handpaint 40,000 oil paintings (which translates to around six frames out of every second of resulting footage) at a rate of five hours per painting, on top of the standard writing, casting, costuming, shooting, editing etc of live-action, is a mission so impractical that Quixote himself would probably have quailed.

Stars: Sonia Mietielica, Kamil Polnisiak, Nicolas Przygoda | Written and Directed by Adrian Panek

Talk about a massive case of false advertising… I was hoping for Dog Soldiers with holocaust survivors, not really what we got with Werewolf (aka Wilkolak) though.

What we do get is a group of kids who have been liberated from a Nazi concentration camp, who end up in a run down mansion somewhere in the woods. Now they find themselves captive again as they fight off starvation and thirst while outside the doors are a pack of vicious German soldier eating dogs. The kids must fight for survival from the beasts outside but could there be a threat within their group yet to rear its head…

Yes, you read that right my good friends… Vicious dogs! Not werewolves (or wilkolak) but angry as hell Alsatians. To say I was a tad upset at this revelation would be an understatement,...

Werewolf is a Polish World War II thriller about eight children who have escaped from a concentration camp and are hiding in a secluded villa to avoid the bloodthirsty hounds that have been released by the SS officers before their retreat.

Summer of 1945. A temporary orphanage is established in an abandoned palace surrounded by forests for the eight children liberated from the Gross-Rosen camp. Hanka, also a former inmate, becomes their guardian. After the atrocities of the camp, the protagonists slowly begin to regain what is left of their childhood, but the horror returns quickly. Camp Alsatians roam the forests around. Released by the SS earlier on, they have gone feral and are starving. Looking for food they besiege the palace. The children are terrified and their camp survival instinct is triggered.

Inspired by real-life, historical events, writer and director Adrian Panek turns the nightmare of the Holocaust into literal monsters.