LandxSea Monthly returns with György Pálfi's HEN from Conic films. 🐔
Told entirely from the perspective of its avian protagonist, HEN follows a chicken who escapes an industrial farm only to find herself navigating the pecking order of a crumbling seaside restaurant in Greece.
As she fights to protect her eggs, she becomes an unwitting witness to the complex human lives around her as the restaurant is caught up in greed, smuggling, and the migrant crisis.
“It is engaging and entertaining stuff with a genre-edge to it that sets it wide apart from the traditional family-oriented live-action animal movies” –Screen Anarchy
From the director: "Using the basic mechanisms of ancient Greek tragedies my film shows individual fates, but it deals with a universal problem that is at the core of all humanity: whether individuals can be absolved of moral responsibility if they are only passive participants in events.
The story is multi-layered; like a hologram, showing the same picture in different planes and dimensions, through two different fates. One is the life of a hen, the other of a man.
Of course, the two are interdependent, intertwined and, although driven by different goals and motivations, inseparable. The smallness and ‘peace’ of the hen’s existence meets in this film
a tragedy of human lives in the midst of a global problem.
In the film Hen, I played with the idea of what happens when the human story is not at the centre. What if we humans are the “side thread” in the story?"