Hen

“With great power comes great responsibility”. But what happens if the hero in question is just a hen? Escaping from a chicken farm, the hen finds refuge in the courtyard of a crumbling restaurant. There, she discovers love, confronts the pecking order, and fights to protect her eggs from human voracity. Her encounter with humans inevitably unveils their violence, their tragedies, their large and small injustices.

COMMENTARY
György Pálfi tells the story of a hen, starting when the egg was laid. It adopts the fowl’s point of view with an effect that is disorienting, disconcerting and post-human. Because the hen – who is stubborn, resilient, determined to raise her own chicks and remain independent – meets not only other animals, but humans too, and inevitably their violence, tragedies and large and small injustices: sometimes as a heedless witness, others as an involuntarily trigger.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
Using the basic mechanisms of ancient Greek tragedies, my film deals with a universal problem: can individuals be absolved of moral responsibility if they are only passive witnesses to an event? The story is multi-layered, it portrays the same situation in different dimensions, through two different fates: one is the life of a hen, the other of man, interdependent but guided by different goals and motivations. The hen’s “peace” meets an all-too human tragedy in the midst of a global problem. In the film, humans are not the focus of the story, they are the “side thread”. I have always considered the world as a place where all living creatures are equally important. It is we humans, in retrospect, who build stories from all of this.