From the moment she hatches on an industrial farm, a black hen is marked as an outsider. She escapes and crosses a perilous Greek landscape before finding shelter in the courtyard of a crumbling seaside restaurant. Among the birds living there, she confronts the pecking order, finds a rooster and searches for somewhere safe to lay her eggs, away from the hands of the restaurant’s owner.
At first, her adventures unfold like a comic survival film. But the lives of the humans around her grow steadily darker. Giorgos, an ageing restaurateur, lives with his daughter and young granddaughter, while his daughter’s boyfriend runs a smuggling operation that soon expands until human beings become its cargo. From close to the ground, the hen witnesses choices whose consequences the humans would rather not see.
Both a modern fable and a Greek tragedy, Hen uses its radical shift in perspective to examine survival, exploitation and moral responsibility. The result is playful, suspenseful and unexpectedly moving: a portrait of humanity seen through the eyes of a creature forced to live with the consequences of our decisions.
