Told entirely from the perspective of its avian protagonist, Hen follows a chicken who escapes an industrial farm only to find herself navigating the pecking order of a crumbling seaside restaurant in Greece.
The Garden Cinema View:
A thrilling oddity, a wonderful anomaly - Hen is the most surprising film of the year and half of our programming team's favourite of 2026. An anarchic smorgasbord of genres ranging from slapstick to drama to thriller, it combines the hilarious with the gut-wrenching, often - remarkably - within the very same scene. Beneath its faux naïf facade lies an incisive commentary on humanity's innate malice, power dynamics and greed - a searing metaphor drawing the line between our mistreatment of animals and our mistreatment of each other.
So strong is the drama, with its delightful surprises at every corner, that the genius of cinematographer Giorgos Karavelas and editor Réka Lemhényi only reveals itself on second viewing. This is cinema at its purest - screenplay, music, acting, and editing as a single instrument, perfectly tuned.
Filmed on a Greek island with an all-Greek cast (and eight real-life Hungarian chickens) and featuring Greek music throughout, this is a Hungarian-Greek co-production born of necessity. Enfant terrible György Pálfi (Hukkle, Taxidermia) has said that Viktor Orbán's production restrictions forced him to move out of Hungary and think outside the box in order to keep creating. We couldn't be happier that he did.
