The Peasants – case study with Sean Bobbit

Sean Bobbit, producer and CEO at BreakThru Films, the animation studio behind the Oscar® nominated ‘Loving Vincent’ and Oscar® winning ‘Peter & The Wolf’, will tell you about the production process of their new film ‘The Peasants’ based upon the Nobel Prize-winning novel by Wladyslaw Reymont. Naturalistic in style but epic in scope, this novel depicts peasants’ everyday reality – their work, customs, culture and spirituality. This unique micro-world is a pretext to tell a universal and current story: a story of tragic love and life in a small community, where rules and tradition dictate everyone’s role. A peasant girl, Jagna, is forced to marry a much older, wealthy farmer, Boryna, despite her love for his son Antek. With time, Jagna becomes the object of envy and hate of the villagers and has to fight to preserve her independence. Participants of the masterclass will have a chance to learn the details of the creative and production process that accompanied the making of “The Peasants”. They will also be able to ask their own questions during the short Q&A session at the end of the meeting.

THE PEASANTS is a tragic story of a peasant girl Jagna forced to marry a much older, wealthy farmer Boryna, despite her love for his son Antek. With time, Jagna becomes the object of envy and hate of the villagers and has to fight to preserve her independence. Set in the Polish countryside on the cusp of the 19th and 20th Centuries, the story’s dramatic turns tie into the changing seasons, hard labour in the fields and traditional local holidays.

Sean Bobbitt – CEO of BreakThru Films studio, which is known for groundbreaking, artistic and commercially successful animation projects. Their first major production, Peter and the Wolf, won the Oscar for best animated short. Loving Vincent is the world’s first fully painted feature film, and was a success both with film festivals and in terms of worldwide box office. This $5.5m film grossed $42m from its theatrical release, making it one of the most successful animations of all time for an adult audience. BreakThru are continuing to develop and produce feature films in the Painting Animation technique they pioneered with Loving Vincent, and will be producing 3 feature films in this technique over the next 10 years.

Moderator: 

Marcin Kotyła (Poland)

The event is organized in cooperation with SPPA and Polish animation.

CEE Animation Experience is supported by Creative Europe MEDIA and the International Visegrad Fund.