No artificial intelligence or CGI: the chicken is truly “an actress”. Indeed, eight birds play the heroine of the film. Meanwhile, in the background, human tragedy unfolds
Behind the feathers of a hen, from its birth to its adventure into the world, György Pálfi stages a bold film, where the bird is the protagonist and, in the background, human events move almost accidentally. From May 28th at the cinema with Officine Ubu, Hen – Story of a hen it deserves all of its 96 minutes of time spent.
On set, one real hen, or rather, eighteach with different characteristics and abilities, give life to a single heroine, in an unconventional cinematic experience to be enjoyed with curiosity. Filmed without the use of CGI or artificial intelligence, the film was made with real animals, thanks to the extraordinary training and staging carried out by Árpád HalászHungarian trainer who worked on the sets of Alien: Romulus, Midsommar, Crawl And Blade Runner 2049.
Plot of Hen – Story of a hen
Pálfi combines experimentation and storytelling. The opening sequences of Hen – Story of a hen are hard to deal with, between chicks of a intensive farming tossed around like objects on an assembly line. It is from here that a hen with black feathers manages to escape and, after various vicissitudes, finds shelter in the courtyard of a dilapidated restaurant. In this Greek countryside, a few kilometers from the sea, she will discover love, face the rigid hierarchy of the henhouse and do everything to protect her eggs.
In the meantime, against the background of the animal adventure, small and big unexpected events happen, of which the hen is sometimes an unaware witness, other times a trigger. Despite herself, she finds herself involved in a very shady business, in which her “protector” (played by Ioannis Kokiasmenos).
The director’s statements
«Using the basic mechanisms of ancient Greek tragedies, my film shows individual destinies, but addresses a universal problem that is at the heart of all humanity: individuals can be absolved from moral responsibility when they are just passive participants in events?”, says director György Pálfi, who also wrote the screenplay together with Ruttkay Zsófia.
«The story is layered, like a hologram, and shows the same image on different planes and dimensions, through two different destinies. One is the life of a chicken, the other that of a man. Naturally the two destinies are interdependent, intertwined and, although driven by different objectives and motivations, inseparable. The smallness and “peace” of the chicken’s existence meet, in this film, the tragedy of human lives in the midst of a global problem.”
And again: «I played with the idea of what happens when human history is not at the center. What if we humans are “the subplot” of the story?”.
In this video, one exclusive clip taken from the film Hen – Story of a hen:
