‘If I were a chicken, I would eat humans’: György Pálfi on the eight-chicken ensemble in ‘Hen’ and making films under Viktor Orbán

The Hungarian filmmaker talks about the eight chickens who share the role of his leading lady in ‘Hen’, the politics that have shaped who gets to make films in Hungary, and the advantages of knowing your dinner extremely well

Updated - September 16, 2026 05:03 pm IST

Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi (left) and one of eight avian protagonists from his latest feature ‘Hen’ | Photo Credit: Special Arragement

A chicken makes perfect sense as a György Pálfi protagonist. With a filmography of oddities spanning Hukkle (2002), Taxidermia (2006) and Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen (2012), the Hungarian filmmaker has had a curious knack for making the patently bizarre feel perfectly matter-of-fact. But even by his standards, Hen sounds rather eccentric. The latest feather in his cap appears to take its cue from the age-old question: why did the chicken cross the road? Why, to escape an industrial poultry farm in Greece and bust a human-trafficking operation, of course.

Funnily enough, György is wary of calling Hen an “animal film” at all. When I mention its kinship with Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO (2022) and Viktor Kossakovsky’s Gunda (2020), he pushes back on the category itself. “I think all these movies are more than animal movies,” he says. “EO and Balthazar, for me, are not animal movies either.” He is conscious of the pigeonhole, and wants to wriggle out of that taxonomy. “I hope I find a different way of telling a story than ‘the donkey movie’, ‘the pig movie’ or ‘the cow movie’,” he says.

The chicken is certainly the hook, but György is after something considerably more philosophical here. “Yes, there is a chicken and the chicken is the main hero,” he says, “but there is also a human story.” The two seem inseparable for him. “I always wanted to find the answer to this question in my movies: how much of us is animal, and what makes us human?” he says. “Why is the human a different animal? Or is the human simply another animal? Is the human a different kind of creature on earth?”

A still from ‘Hen’ | Photo Credit: Pallas Film

The chicken also gives György a particularly direct way of confronting that uncertainty. She is governed by impulses that humans recognise intimately, while remaining blissfully unburdened by the temporal and moral consciousness that makes human choice such a complicated business. “Humans know the past, present and future,” he says. “When a human creates something or makes a decision, there has to be responsibility for that decision. A chicken doesn’t have that responsibility. It just wants to survive. It wants to eat, have sex, raise its children and care for them.”

Those questions of fate and free will led György to Greece, where the landscape gave Hen the vocabulary of ancient tragedy. “When we got the chance to make a movie in Greece, we knew we wanted to use the structure and subject of ancient Greek tragedy to tell a human story,” he says. What fascinated him was the contradiction that has kept those stories alive for centuries: “Do we really have free will? And if not, why are we responsible for the consequences? Why do we have to live with them?”

The chicken’s appearance was also dictated by the world she comes from. György wanted her to be recognisably an industrial bird, so he began by looking at the breeds used in commercial poultry production. The whiteness of the conventional Leghorn chicken posed a practical problem: how does an audience keep track of one chicken among many? His solution was to make the protagonist black, turning her into what he calls an “industrial or evolutionary mistake”. The production eventually settled on a black Australorp-Leghorn type of chicken, and the animal trainer bought 15 young birds from a farm. Eight would eventually make the journey to Greece.

The casting process eventually became a division of labour. Each chicken had a particular aptitude, which meant that the protagonist was effectively played by a small ensemble of birds, called upon according to what a scene required. One could run particularly fast. Another could remain in the same spot for hours. Another had learned to peck on command. Then there was Feri, the chicken who seemed to have a knack for everything. “Whenever the others couldn’t do something, we called Feri and said, ‘Come on, this is your job. The others can’t do it.’”

A still from ‘Hen’ | Photo Credit: Pallas Film

The more remarkable part of the process was how little of it depended on forcing the birds to perform. György credits their animal trainer, Árpád Halász, with earning the hens’ trust long before they reached the set. “He made a very safe environment for them. We humans became friends with these animals, and they became friends with us,” he says. By the time the eight hens reached Greece, they were already comfortable around people and the routines of the set. “They were so calm,” György says. “They were like colleagues. They were very collaborative and very open. They weren’t afraid of humans at all.”