Hen (Kota) had its UK première at Glasgow Film Festival, 28 Feb 2026
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Hen raises this question, without clearly answering it, by opening with a graphic close-up of a hen’s feathered behind as an egg is slowly pushed out. That hen is one of thousands in an industrial hatchery, where the eggs are removed, sorted and incubated en masse, and then the chicks that emerge – one in particular grabbing attention for being black in a sea of yellow – are cleaned and processed before being packed live in crates to be transported and butchered elsewhere.
In fact eggs must have come before chickens – because dinosaurs, the prehistoric ancestors to birds, already had eggs long before the chicken existed. There is a scene where that black Leghorn strays into a house, to a room where a little girl (Eleni Apostopolou) is watching a TV documentary on dinosaurs. As the hen momentarily stops and stares at the on-screen CGI tyrannosaurs that, like her, walk bipedally, we wonder if she is recognising her own ancient relatives. Of course, deep down we know that chickens are dumb animals, not intelligent enough to recognise, to reflect, and to reason. Yet György Pálfi’s film, co-written with Zsófia Ruttkay, tracks the chick’s escape from the dinner plate and her unscheduled survival into maturity and maternity, as all the while she observes – without quite understanding – the peculiar behaviours of the humans and other animals around her. Like Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966) or Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo (2022), except focalised through a bird rather than a donkey, this lets its story unfold through the hen’s point of view, and so tricks us into projecting our own thoughts and feelings onto this unusual perspective while at the same time reducing all human drama to incidental background event.
If you have ever wondered why the chicken crossed the road – and here it is a busy and dangerous motorway – the reason, it turns out, is to evade the jaws of a hungry fox. After escaping a transport truck and that canine predator, the hen eventually falls in with old Giorgos (Yannis Kokiasmenonos), whose seafood restaurant, with its panoramic view, has fallen into disuse, and whose daughter (Maria Diakopanayotou) has invited the smugglers – for whom her boyfriend (Argyris Pandazaras) works – to store their ill-gotten goods on the property. Those good include not just material items, but also trafficked humans, transported in the back of vans like livestock.
As the hen is variously appetitive, horny, curious and broody, Giorgos is, in his way, no less cooped up, having lost control of his business to the cuckooing criminal gang. Giorgos’ kindness towards the hen both defines what type of man he is, and forges a bond between human and animal, in a film which has, right from its opening in a poultry farm, been tracing where the two domestic species intersect. After all, are we not too, in our efforts to survive and to leave something behind, constantly searching for food, love, family and a free range where we feel secure?
Remarkably, the bird here is not a Chicken Run-style stop-motion model or a CGI confection, but rather eight real hens, no doubt wrangled with immense patience and seamlessly composited through editing to seem like a single biddy. So the film vacillates between realism and fable, as it shows the human condition through avian eyes – eyes which Werner Herzog famously described as windows onto “a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity”, even as he designated chickens themselves as “the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world”. Pálfi will prove far more sympathetic to the hen at the centre of his film, and will align its gaze with our own. And even if, at the beginning, we see the chicken before we see the egg, both form part of life’s cycle, and Hen will end with more eggs and more hatchlings, as the whole story, in all its comedy and tragedy, promises to start again. After all, as Giorgos says to the hen: “We’re still alive. A second chance.”
strap: György Pálfi’s realist fable offers a bird’s eye view on what fundamentally drives the existence of all animals – including humans
© Anton Bitel
