Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi's "Hen" arrives in theaters November 6 from Dekanalog, offering a darkly comic perspective on Europe's migrant crisis told through the viewpoint of a jet-black Leghorn chicken.
The film follows a hen named Feri who escapes a Greek factory farm after being separated from her flock due to her unusual plumage. She is captured by a worker transporting her home for dinner, but flees when the truck stops to refuel. A dog named Titan carries her to a ramshackle seaside restaurant owned by Yannis Kokiasmenos, where she navigates a new pecking order while human dramas unfold mostly out of frame.
Pálfi deploys chicken point-of-view shots to literalize the story's conceit, capturing moments like the hen trapped in a cardboard box. The director treats Feri and her stunt doubles without anthropomorphizing, allowing the animal's natural obliviousness to contrast with human indifference to suffering. Cinematographer Giorgos Karvelas employs saturated color work, while composer Szabolcs Szoke delivers a hyperactive score that bends genre conventions toward something resembling a chicken's vision of a Western.
The film mines absurdist humor from its premise. A tense courtship between Feri and an aggressive suitor plays out under a classic Greek love song. Meanwhile, desperate migrants face death off-screen. The contrast proves deliberate. By film's end, Pálfi cuts from a single egg being laid to thousands tumbling inside factory machinery, suggesting that individual lives command our attention while mass suffering becomes invisible.