With their next painted animation feature film project The Peasants making its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) this weekend, directors DK Welchman (previously known as Dorota Kobiela) and Hugh Welchman have unveiled the latest “Directors’ Pick” spotlight piece from their ongoing Loving Vincent painting sale. Taken from the “She was his friend, too,” scene in the 2017 biopic, the hand-painted frame features Chris O’Dowd as Postman Joseph Roulin, painted by Gdansk team painting supervisor Anna Kluza, a lead animator on The Peasants.
The first-ever oil painting animated feature, Loving Vincent follows a young man retracing the final steps of the Vincent Van Gogh. The story begins following the artist’s death, when Roulin asks his son, Armand (Douglas Booth) to deliver Van Gogh’s final letters to his brother in Paris — who sadly has also passed. Armand then travels to the painter’s last hometown, and gets caught up in the mystery surrounding his death.
Originally conceived as a short, the film took nearly 10 years to produce and required 65,000 frames to be hand-painted on canvas by a crew of 125 artists. Loving Vincent premiered at the Annecy Festival and went on to win Best Animation at the European Film Awards, as well as animated feature nominations at the Oscars, BAFTAs, Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards and Annies. The reference footage/voice cast also featured Jerome Flynn, Saoirse Ronan, Josh Sessions, Eleanor Tomlinson, Aidan Turner and Helen McCrory in her final film role. Dutch actor Jochum ten Haaf voiced Vincent, who was modeled on Robert Gulaczyk of renowned Modjeska Theatre in Legnica, Poland.
Since the film’s premiere and more urgently in order to create space for the production of The Peasants, the production paintings used in Loving Vincent have been exhibited and are being offered for sale to the public. In the video below, Hugh Welchman explains more about the pre-TIFF Directors’ Pick frame. See all the pieces on offer at LovingVincent.com/Paintings.
Making its World Premiere Friday, September 8 at TIFF, The Peasants is described by the festival programmers thusly:
Told through seasons that honor the cyclical rituals of ploughing, plantation, and harvest, this adaptation of Władysław Reymont’s Nobel Prize–winning novel of the same title (written in four volumes between 1904 and 1909 and translated into 27 languages) recounts the tale of a charming and voluptuous woman named Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) hungering for love and lacking in cunning. Her home of Lipce, a God-fearing village, is full of characters, including a lecherous mayor, a snooty church organist, and a razor-tongued gossip, and hundreds of storks that, according to lore, foretell the arrival of new life. Here, Jagna creates havoc by marrying a wealthy widower named Boryna (Mirosław Baka), whose children and their families — including the apple of her eye, his brawny son, Antek (Robert Gulaczyk) — work the land and expect inheritance. Jagna’s fate is all but sealed when she breaks one of the few societal taboos.
The adult-targeted film runs 114 minutes and is a co-production effort between Poland, Lithuania and Serbia. Additional screening times and ticketing for TIFF available here.
