Animated drama
The Peasants (M18)
115 minutes
Polish author Wladyslaw Reymont’s novel, published in parts between 1904 and 1909, has been adapted several times for the screen.
The latest attempt at turning the Nobel Prize-winning novel into a film was released in 2023 and uses the medium of painted animation.
The action was first captured on film using live actors. Classically trained artists then used the resulting footage to paint, by hand, reference oil paintings. These were then photographed, with the digital images given to animators to create a sense of motion and movement.
The film’s co-directors are DK Welchman from Poland and Hugh Welchman from the United Kingdom. The married couple are behind the Oscar-nominated Vincent van Gogh biography Loving Vincent (2017), a film which pioneered the use of the slow and painstaking animation technique seen in The Peasants.
The Peasants is set around the turn of the 20th century, in a village in Poland. The young and beautiful Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) is in love with a married man. The man’s wealthy widower father desires Jagna and marries her, resulting in a union that will bring trouble to the family and the village.
The animated drama is being screened as part of the Polish Film Showcase, which is co-presented by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Singapore and The Projector. The showcase opens the eighth edition of the Polish Festival in Singapore, PolandShiok!. Details of the festival are at polandshiok.sg
Where: Golden Village x The Projector at Cineleisure, Level 5, 8 Grange Road
MRT: Somerset
When: April 12, 8pm
Admission: $13 (student/senior concession), $15 (weekend standard)
Info: theprojector.sg/films-and-events/the-peasants
Action thriller
Monkey Man (R21)
121 minutes, now showing
4 stars
Revenge stories do not get much more brutal or minimalist than this homage to Bruce Lee gongfu, Indian mythology and Bollywood action movies.
Co-written and helmed by and starring British actor Dev Patel, it combines hard-hitting martial arts with a dash of the exploitation crime thriller. The bloodletting and bare skin on display are enough to warrant an R21 classification, for sexual scenes and violence.
Somewhere in India, the impoverished Kid (Dev Patel) makes a living fighting in underground matches. His meagre earnings go towards a single goal – to find the men responsible for his wretched and lonely condition.
His sleep is troubled by post-trauma flashbacks that give Kid his obsession with retribution, while the pummellings he dishes out are set to modern electronic dance music. Patel’s athleticism in fight scenes is breathtaking.
The monkey man persona Kid adopts is a nod to the Hindu deity Hanuman, while the villains represent an aspect of the region. Kid is a wrathful deity, striking down the men behind systemic corruption, social inequality and religious hypocrisy.
Drama
Drift (NC16)
93 minutes, showing exclusively at The Projector
4 stars
Drift contains ideas attached to the work of acclaimed Singapore film-maker Anthony Chen, such as outsider characters seeking kinship and the need for self-protection struggling against the hunger for connection.
Jacqueline (Cynthia Erivo) is a refugee from war-torn Liberia fighting to survive on the streets of a touristy Greek coastal city. She meets Callie (Alia Shawkat), an American tour guide. Despite their differences, they form a friendship. The film is based on Alexander Maksik’s 2013 novel A Marker To Measure Drift, and adapted for the screen by Maksik and Susanne Farrell.
Erivo delivers a magnetic performance as the woman holding on to the shreds of her former identity while learning to adapt to a new one in which she is either invisible or, when noticed, considered a pest. There is a focus on the ebb and flow of emotions as the women negotiate boundaries and find ways to communicate.
There are no easy triumphs for either woman, but by the film’s end, it becomes clear that all one needs is hope, and that, thankfully, is provided.
There will be a post-show Q&A with director Chen on April 6 at 7.30pm.
