Elms College to Host Screening of Award-winning Film ‘The Peasants’ on Oct. 26

CHICOPEE — To celebrate Polish Heritage Month, Elms College will host a showing of The Peasants, a 2024 Polish film nominated in the Best International Feature Film category of the 96th Academy Awards, on Sunday, Oct. 26. The screening, free and open to the public, is scheduled for 2 p.m. in the Alumnae Library theater on the Elms campus.

The Peasants is inspired by Wladyslaw Reymont’s famed 1924 four-volume novel of the same name, which earned the Nobel Prize for Literature. Adapted by DK and Hugh Welchman into an animated film comprised of more than 40,000 oil paintings, the film has been described by reviewers as “awe-inspiring.”

The Peasants shows the life of Jagna, a young peasant girl in a small, rural village in Poland in the years before World War I. Determined to forge her own path in a community bound by tradition and patriarchy, she becomes entangled in a web of desire, gossip, and power struggles that ultimately lead to a tragic confrontation with the world around her.

The presentation is co-hosted by the Kosciuszko Foundation New England Chapter and sponsored by Polish National Credit Union.