Watch The Exhilarating Full Trailer For A Hand-Painted Film About Van Gogh

What went on in the blazing imagination of iconic post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh? A biopic seven years in the making attempts to offer a glimpse into the revolutionary artist’s beautiful mind using the medium he preferred: paint. 

Painter Dorota Kobiela and filmmaker Hugh Welchman are the guiding forces behind “Loving Vincent,” which is reportedly the first entirely hand-painted feature film ever made. On Monday, the internet was blessed with a full trailer for the movie, which HuffPost originally covered last year .

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film takes the shape of a mystery, revolving around van Gogh’s sudden death in 1890. A character based on real-life portrait subject Armand Roulin serves as the narrator and pseudo-detective in the movie, who retraces van Gogh’s steps and revisits his most iconic artworks in a search for a plausible explanation for the artist’s contested  suicide. 

Rather than coming to a clean conclusion, the film offers a complicated portrait of a man whose mental health remains a subject of debate to this day.   

The film was created with the help of 125 artists who together transformed 120 of van Gogh’s paintings into 65,000 painted frames based on live action sequences. After a callout for artists went viral last year,  van Gogh wannabes applied to train and work at the the film’s studio in Gdansk, Poland. 

“We cannot speak other than by our paintings,” van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo shortly before his death. Thanks to Kobiela and Welchman’s ambitious project, van Gogh’s story will be told in his native tongue. 

According to IMDB , “Loving Vincent” has some recognizable stars on board: Chris O’Dowd, Saoirse Ronan and Aidan Turner, to name a few. The film is set to hit theaters Sept. 22. In the meantime, you can check out our previous coverage of behind-the-scenes clips  showing how the actors’ live action performances were translated into swirling pigment. 

CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this story stated that Aidan Turner plays Vincent Van Gogh in the film. In fact, he plays a character named Boatman.