György Pálfi’s “Chicken” creates the unlikely film star The Chicken. The world premiere in Toronto’s competitive platform section, “Hen” sees the Hungarian director employing a cast of eight real-life chicken stars in order to create melancholic meditations moving in seaside villages against the backdrop of the Grease immigration crisis.
Speaking to Variety ahead of the film’s premiere, the “stuffed” filmmaker says that while the film was performed at Cannes and won major international awards, the rare film idea came first to him as he was experiencing “difficult times” in 2019. “For political reasons, I have not been able to make films in Hungary for quite some time, but I still haven’t. I wanted to run away from everyone. I didn’t want to give up on filmmaking. I was looking for something that could be done on a small budget and exploring universal themes.
“Hen” was almost completely filmed from the perspective of the bird protagonist, and presented a series of logistical challenges when it came to filming. Luckily for the director, his friend and animal trainer Arapad Harasi had extensive experience with chickens. This is the first animal that trainers need to deal with while learning. Anyone who fails to treat chickens fails to train animals.
“The most difficult part was probably determining the variety,” the director adds. “It was important to our story of chickens being industrial chickens, so we chose Legone, one of the most common breeds. Their training began several months before filming based on written scenes. Even before the film got green light, we offered the chickens and agreed to train him.”
Logistically, the most difficult challenge when dealing with animals was that they were not legally permitted to leave the European Union. “So instead of taking the shortest route through Serbia, they had to travel through Italy to Greece and board the ferry,” the director explains. Of course, there was also the fact that Roosters didn’t work after sunset, which limits how many hours of filming a day.
Courtesy of TIFF
By choosing to use special effects to support CGI, AI, or chicken POV, Pálfi says, “It’s important to have live connections between actors, whether animals or humans. The relationship with real creatures is noticeably different. It’s something that gives you credibility. It’s exciting to work with something very new that evolves every day.”
Commenting on the specific cinema shoot for such a film, the Hungarian director praises collaborator Jogos Carvelas, whom he calls “one of the most sensitive and talented Greek cinematographers.”
“We wanted to work with the chickens, just as we did in a classic American film where the actors were on the eye level,” he says. “We couldn’t dig the camera into the ground, so we used a special periscope optic. It didn’t make the work easier…”
And did Palfi learn anything from the chickens hens he could employ in his filmmaking in the future? “Lots!” he says. “When tensions started on the set, the chickens were always very sensitive and it was impossible to work with them. But when the energy flowed well, they made it all perfect.
But “Hen” at its heart is far more than the singular chicken life, and Palfi observes not only the family living around the chicken, but also the complex politics of how much sociopolitical change has affected life. “Beyond the remarkable inner need of creation, the film is also about personal responsibility and whether we can separate our own lives from the events around us,” the director says.
“If the viewers are willing to come with me, this film will play so that they can see the world from a different perspective for thought experiments,” he adds. “And the next step is to ask questions. Are we more than chicken in a box, just looking at the bigger picture as much as we see in the human world?”
“Hen” is a collaboration between Palsfox and ZDF/Arte, and is produced by Pallas Film, View Master Films and Twenty Twenty Vision. Lucky Number handles global sales.
