REVFF26: Hen

“With great power comes great responsibility” — but what if the hero is just a hen? Escaping from a chicken farm, she finds refuge in the courtyard of a crumbling restaurant. There, she discovers love, confronts the pecking order, and fights to protect her eggs from a greedy owner. Her droll yet touching quest for motherhood mirrors the messy compromises and silent struggles of human lives. 

Hen is a short, sharply observed piece that tracks a chicken moving through a rural environment, but Pálfi treats that simple premise with a kind of tactile intensity. The camera stays low, close to the ground, following the hen’s movements as it pecks, scratches, startles—registering the world almost entirely through its physical, sensory logic.

What emerges isn’t story in a conventional sense, but a perspective. We’re drawn into the rhythms of the animal’s existence: the constant foraging, the alertness to threat, the fleeting moments of calm. The environment—mud, grass, farm detritus—becomes immersive, almost hyper-real, and the sound design heightens that immediacy. Human presence is peripheral at best, felt more as pressure than as character.

There’s a subtle arc in the way tension builds. The everyday activity of the hen starts to feel precarious, even fragile, as the film edges toward an implied threat. Pálfi doesn’t overstate it, but the awareness of vulnerability—of being small, exposed, and entirely within the food chain—gives the film its charge.

It’s a deceptively simple work, but one that reframes point of view in a very direct way—less about narrative development than about inhabiting another mode of being, if only briefly.

Festivals & Awards

Toronto International Film Festival | Honorable Mention: Platform Award
Sydney Film Festival | Official Selection

Feature
Dir. György Pálfi
Germany, Greece, Hungary
2025

Screens with the short film ‘ACTS OF PROTEST’
Zebedee Parkes
Australia, 2025, 7.42mins