Oil-Painted Vincent Van Gogh Feature ‘Loving Vincent’ Gets Fall U.S. Release Date

The much-buzzed-about European animated feature Loving Vincent, billed by its producers as the world’s first fully-oil painted feature film, is gearing up for a fall release in the United States.

Los Angeles-based indie distributor Good Deed Entertainment, which acquired U.S. and English-speaking Canada rights to Loving Vincent, will launch the film in New York City on September 22 and Los Angeles on September 29, followed by a national expansion beginning on October 6. The release is obviously aimed at making a strong impression right at the beginning of awards season, and if everything goes as planned, it should be contender for end-of-year awards later in the fall and winter.

Directed by the husband-and-wife team of Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, the film uses 65,000 oil painted frames to explore the mysteries surrounding the death of the legendary Dutch painter. Last month, Loving Vincent won both the audience award at the Annecy animation festival in France and best animation film at the Shanghai International Film Festival.

The film has already been sold in dozens of territories around the globe, but it appears that the United States is where it will start its commercial theatrical run. Kobiela and Welchman acknowledged this in a statement:

“[A] lot of support came to us from members of the public in America. We received financial support, moral support and enthusiastic encouragement that got us through some dark times, so for us it is absolutely fitting that the first place in the world that this film will go before the public is in America. And as our film opens with a gigantic tracking shot down from the stars, which took three of our best painters a combined 18 months to animate, all inspired by Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” part of The Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, there could be no more fitting place to open the film than in New York.”

The 95-minute Loving Vincent is a Polish/U.K. co-production produced by Trademark Films and Break Thru Films. The film received funding from the Lower Silesian Film Fund, the City of Wroclaw, Centrum Technologii Audiowizualnych, Silver Reel, Sevenex Capital Partners, and the Doha Film Institute. A Kickstarter campaign also raised nearly $70,000. The entire budget was around $5.5 million.

To learn more about the production of the film, read our in-depth profile of Loving Vincent.