Had a massive amount of images that I was trying to process for a specific purpose. I wound up spinning up multiple python processes within a java wrapper using concurrent linked queues. Got the job done but it's not the proudest moment of my life.
You could have done this with the multiprocessing module. It interfaces like the threading library but it's launching new processes for each "thread". I've done a shitload of image processing in Python with it. You'll end up with a 100% Python version of what you did.
Python calling a concurrent c thing is super common. For more complex things there is multiprocessing, but that essentially is simplification of IPC.