"What are you doing here? When did you escape?" Since taking his very first steps in the film world with Hukkle and Taxidermia [+leggi anche:
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intervista: György Pálfi
scheda film] sees the director taking his particular preferences for film experiences even further, because, along the lines of Jerzy Skolimowski’s donkey protagonist seen three years ago in Cannes winner EO [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], the Hungarian filmmaker has entrusted the lead role in his new film to an animal.

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This animal is a humble hen who’s going to cluck and peck anywhere she can while trying to avoid trouble and whilst also laying eggs and gradually getting to grips - in her direct and particularly stubborn way - with the world she’s romping around in. It’s a funny, animal-focused "coming of age" tale with no shortage of comic overtones, which casts a very serious sidelong glance at human morality which is (more or less actively) mired in the lure of profit, complacency ("no-one takes care of anything anymore") and selfishness, to the point of treating others like livestock and obliterating any sense of responsibility towards younger generations.

"My wife’s going to make a delicious soup out of her." For our heroine, the hen, it all begins in an industrial poultry unit, where wooden pallets overflow with eggs which quickly transform into sweeping broods of chicks which are tipped out onto conveyor belts, before reaching adult size in a vast, over-crowded shed. But the black colour of this particular hen’s plumage (which classes as a differentiating factor) saves her from the fate of her fellow chicks and sees her discovering the vast world from the passenger seat of a lorry, and then freedom by way of a service station, courtesy of an open window. The deadly threat of a fox and a motorway crossing ensue, as does a ramble through a big city and a return to the countryside, only to end up in the jaws of a dog who takes her to the ramshackle, seaside “Panorama” restaurant where an old man (Ioannis Kokiasmenos) lives with his daughter (Maria Diakopanagioti), her partner (Argyris Pantazaras), and their own daughter. It’s a place plagued by smuggling, where our hen gets acquainted with life in a chicken coop (and a hyperactive cockerel). But what happens to all the eggs she lays? Our protagonist will embark upon repeated escape attempts in order to carry out her investigation, in her relatively reckless gallinaceous style. And she’ll stumble from one revelation to the next over the treatment reserved for her kind and the nature of human morals…

A tour de force in terms of its mise en scène (the film shoot involved real animals against a highly realistic setting), bolstered by director of photography Giorgos Karvelas’s agile approach, Hen is an often-humorous work which also plays with Szőke Szabolcs’ brilliant score. But the director’s incredibly creative script penned with Zsófia Ruttkay also introduces an array of additional dimensions into the movie, which are reminiscent of parables (migrant smuggling chiming with animal imprisonment and the hen’s maternal instinct contrasting with decaying relationships between human beings) and existential subjects (life and death, the individual vs the group, love and desire, children, the possibility of changing, etc.). Because who’s actually eating who and who’s tearing each other apart in our world?

Hen was produced by Pallas Film (Germany), View Master Films (Greece) and Twenty Twenty Vision (Germany), in co-production with Focusfox and ZDF/ARTE. Lucky Number are steering world sales.