This year's Cine Europa opened with a powerful screening of the Polish film The Peasants.

Now in its 28th year, the festival brings together an exceptional lineup of 28 European films, in collaboration with their corresponding embassies,  to celebrate culture, dialogue, and the art of storytelling. 

The Peasants, helmed by Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominated directors DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, tells the story of Lipce, a Polish town in the late 19th century bound together by pride, tradition, and a deeply ingrained patriarchy.

Lipce became a hive of gossip and continuing feuds. Jagna, the young woman at the heart of it all, is torn between the competing interests of the village's wealthiest farmer, his oldest son and other prominent men.

She is admired, desired, and also judged. Ultimately, she’s rejected by the community that shaped her life. 

"The story is much more than history, it’s about a woman’s right to choose who she wants to be and about the courage it takes to pay the price of that choice," Anna Krzak-Danel, Charge d'Affaires of the Polish Embassy in the Philippines said.

The movie is split into four chapters, one for each season of the year. Jagna's pressured into marriage with a widower old enough to be her father. Though she's having an affair with his married son, she's desired by many men who attempt to r*pe her.

Gossip and some tragedies befall the town, and before Jagna knew it, the people believe she is the cause of it.

“When Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont wrote his novel, women lived in a world of restrictions. Today, women are Presidents, Prime Ministers and business leaders. And yet, even now, they sometimes face barriers — those placed by society and those they unknowingly place on themselves," Krzak-Danel said.

And that's the reason why the film still speaks to the modern audience powerfully. 

“Jagna to us is not only a figure from the past. She is a mirror in which the women of today still see their own struggles. I hope that tonight, as you watch The Peasants, you will not only enjoy its beauty as a work of art but also reflect on the freedom we all seek and the strength it takes to claim it,” she ended.

The Peasants ends with the townsfolk seizing Jagna, threw mud at her while stripping her naked. It was produced in the same painting technique of Loving Vincent.