A Hen, Greece, and Two Very Different Kinds of Cinema
While audiences are filling theaters for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a $250 million adaptation of one of the foundational stories of ancient Greece, I recently watched a very different film set in Greece: Hen.
Directed by Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi, Hen is a 2025 Hungarian-German-Greek co-production, spoken in Greek, that follows a chicken escaping an industrial farm and eventually finding herself around a decaying seaside restaurant. Behind that simple premise is a much darker human story involving migration, poverty, violence, and people smuggling.
What fascinated me most is how ordinary the film feels at the beginning.
The opening almost looks like a documentary about chickens and industrial egg production. My daughter became fascinated with those first minutes and wanted to watch them over and over again. For her, there was an egg, a hen, and this strange little journey.
But the film slowly changes.
We remain close to the hen and begin witnessing a completely different reality through her eyes. What initially feels playful becomes a dark comedy and, eventually, something much more disturbing. Human trafficking and migration enter the story almost indirectly, as parts of the environment this animal happens to move through.
That perspective is what makes the film so unusual.
The boundary between documentary and fiction sometimes becomes difficult to locate. The hen does not appear to be “performing” in the way we expect an actor to perform, yet through camera placement, editing, animal training, and the construction of the human story around her, Pálfi brings these two worlds together. Eight trained hens were actually used to create the central character.
There is also something funny about encountering Hen at the same moment as Nolan’s The Odyssey. One gives us Greece through mythology, IMAX cameras, movie stars, and hundreds of millions of dollars. The other gives us contemporary Greece from roughly the height of a chicken.
I am interested in both.
But Hen is a good reminder that cinema does not necessarily become more interesting as it becomes bigger. Sometimes an absurdly simple idea, a chicken walking through the world, can open a surprisingly wide window onto the world we live in.
And that is one of the reasons I continue to love independent films.
