About film

The Mill and the Cross is based on Peter Bruegel’s painting, ‘The Way to Calvary’. Art historian Michael Francis Gibson wrote a book on the painting, in which the story of Christ’s Passion is set in Flanders in 1564. Among the five hundred plus figures swarming over Bruegel’s canvas, Gibson and Majewski selected a dozen characters whose life stories unfold and intertwine. Extremely complex computer graphics were employed to situate the action within the painting. Majewski has previously based features on paintings; the Washington Post called his adaptation of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, “the most powerful film made in years.”