György Pálfi’s “Hen” makes a movie star of an unlikely figure: the chicken. Having its world premiere in Toronto’s competitive Platform section, “Hen” sees the Hungarian director enlist a stellar cast of eight real-life chickens all taking turns as the titular character to build a moving, melancholic musing on life in a seaside village against the backdrop of Greece’s migrant crisis.
Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s premiere, the “Taxidermia” filmmaker — whose work has played in Cannes and won major awards internationally — says the idea for the unusual film first came to him in 2019 as he was undergoing a “difficult period.” “For political reasons, I had been unable to make films in Hungary for quite some time and still am. I wanted to get away from everything and everyone. I didn’t want to give up filmmaking, I was looking for something that could be done on a small budget and explored a universal theme, and I have had a connection to chickens since childhood.”
“Hen” is almost entirely shot from the point of view of its aviary protagonist, which presented a series of logistical challenges when it came to shooting. Luckily for the director, his friend and animal trainer Árpád Halász had extensive experience with chickens, which are the first animals trainers need to deal with during their learning. Anyone who fails at handling chickens will fail their animal trainer education.
“Perhaps the most difficult part was deciding on the breed,” adds the director. “Since it was important for our story that the chickens be industrial chickens, we chose one of the most common breeds, the Leghorn. Their training began months before filming, based on the written scenes. We had to buy them even before the film got the green light. We agreed with Árpád that I would provide the chickens and he would train them.”
Logistically, the most difficult challenge in dealing with the animals was that they were not legally allowed to leave the European Union. “So instead of taking the shortest route through Serbia, they had to travel to Greece via Italy, taking a ferry,” the director explains. There was also the fact that roosters, of course, do not work after sunset, so there was a limitation in how many hours a day they could shoot.
Courtesy of TIFF
As for opting out of using CGI, AI, or any special effects to help with the chicken POV, Pálfi says it is “important to have a live connection between actors, whether they are animals or humans. The relationship with a real, living being is noticeably different; that’s what gives it credibility. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in AI. My creative curiosity is at work, and I want to try it out. I’m in the middle of an experiment right now, and it’s very exciting to work with something so new that is evolving day by day.”
Commenting on the particular cinematography for such a film, the Hungarian director praises collaborator Jogos Karvelas, who he calls “one of the most sensitive and talented Greek cinematographers.”
“We wanted to work with the chickens in the same way that actors were filmed in classic American films, somewhere below eye level,” he says. “We couldn’t dig the camera into the ground, so we used special periscope optics. It didn’t make the work any easier…”
And has Pálfi learned anything from the chickens he can employ in his filmmaking in the future? “A lot!” he says. “When tension arose on set, the hens always reacted very sensitively, and it was impossible to work with them. But when the energy flowed well, they did everything perfectly. I have never experienced so tangibly how powerful it is when a team can really work as a team, putting aside personal differences for a common goal.”
But “Hen” is, at its core, about much more than the life of a singular chicken, with Pálfi observing the intricate politics of not only the family living around the hen but also how great sociopolitical changes have affected their lives — most noticeably since some of the family members have begun smuggling immigrants through the sea. “Beyond the unquenchable inner necessity of creation, this film is also about individual responsibility and whether our own lives can be separated from the events around us,” says the director.
“If the viewer is willing to come with me, then in this film we play with allowing ourselves to see the world from a different perspective for the sake of a thought experiment,” he adds. “And the next step is to ask the question: what if we only see as much of the whole picture as this chicken sees of the human world? Are we more than a chicken in the box?”
“Hen” is produced by Pallas Film, View Master Films and Twenty Twenty Vision in co-production with Focusfox and ZDF/ARTE. Lucky Number handles world sales.
