Władysław Reymont’s Peasants, although awarded with the Nobel Prize, forced into the framework of school reading compulsion, in the common understanding, similarly to Nad Niemnem, function as a synonym of boredom, literary obsolescence and school kids’ oppression suffered at the hands of Polish teachers. Undeservedly so, as the novel still amazes literary scholars with its incredible narrative technique, structure and language skills. Not to mention great and small human dramas, the anthropological sense of community, individual experience and emotions. Will the film by DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, made in the same painting animation technique as Loving Vincent, and whose aesthetics refer to Józef Chełmoński’s paintings of village life, will make the audience look more favourably at one of the greatest literary works of early modernism? Will the viewers fall in love with this story? The excellent soundtrack prepared by Łukasz L.U.C. Rostkowski will certainly help, himself a renowned rapper and music producer.

The case of the film adaptation of Peasants, which is the Polish candidate for the Oscar, is special. On the one hand, thanks to the very characteristic animation technique of painting each frame of the film with oil paint on canvas, it draws special attention to its form and refers to easily recognizable cultural codes and well-known aesthetics of Young Poland painting – i.e. the surface and the outside. On the other hand, it tries to draw the viewer into the drama of everyday life in the Polish countryside at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, inviting the viewers to immerse themselves in oil paintings of village customs. Music plays a significant role in this work. L.U.C. and Rebel Babel Orchestra, when creating the soundtrack, abandoned the achievements of modern technology and reached for traditional instruments to create the presence of a bygone world, its sounds and affects. To recreate the sound experiences of the inhabitants of an old village, the musicians recorded in an open-air museum and a wooden cottage. It is definitely not just ordinary illustrative music in folk disguise. It not only reflects the emotions of the film characters, but also, although it constitutes a coherent whole, conceptually and formally, with the image, it itself creates an amazing world composed of sounds, moods and rhythms. L.U.C. concert & Rebel Babel Film Orchestra at the National Forum of Music is a unique opportunity to immerse yourself in it. They will be accompanied on stage by Sutari, Maria Pomianowska and the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra, and on the screen we will see fragments of this extraordinary film.