The studio in Kyiv had to be shut down after Russia invaded Ukraine. The painters were evacuated. When the studio reopened as fighting eased in the capital, Russian bombardment of the power grid plunged the city into darkness.

The producers launched a Kickstarter campaign to buy a generator so the artists could continue working through the winter.

THE PEASANTS (Chłopi) - directed by DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, the husband-and-wife team behind Loving Vincent - adapts Władysław Reymont's Nobel Prize-winning novel, published in four volumes between 1904 and 1909.

Their approach: shoot the entire film as a live-action production over eight weeks on sound stages with green screens and partial sets built from recycled materials. They would then send the footage to over a hundred painters across studios in Poland, Serbia, Lithuania, and Ukraine, who would paint every frame in oil, in the styles of turn-of-the-century Polish realist painters.

Three-quarters of the painters from Loving Vincent had to leave the project because the level of realism required was beyond what that film had demanded. Each keyframe took five hours to paint. The total came to over 40,000 oil paintings and more than 200,000 hours of work across the production. A single painter working alone would have needed a hundred years.

The film became the most-watched Polish theatrical release of 2023, selling over a million tickets domestically. Poland submitted it as their Academy Award entry for Best International Feature Film. It was not shortlisted.