György Pálfi ’s “Hen” makes a movie star of an unlikely figure: the chicken. Having its world premiere in Toronto’s competitive Platform section, “Hen” sees the Hungarian director enlist a stellar cast of eight real-life chickens all taking turns as the titular character to build a moving, melancholic musing on life in a seaside village against the backdrop of Greece’s migrant crisis.

Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s premiere, the “Taxidermia” filmmaker — whose work has played in Cannes and won major awards internationally — says the idea for the unusual film first came to him in 2019 as he was undergoing a “difficult period.” “For political reasons, I had been unable to make films in Hungary for quite some time and still am. I wanted to get away from everything and everyone.

See Full Page