What the… Hen? Review by Edin Čusto

Don Quixote’s Horse Rocinante Meets Łukasz Puczko’s Hen Marysia

Polish What the… Hen? highlights the riskiness of observational documentaries

By Edin Čusto

Joanna Deja’s feature debut contributes to an emerging trend of non-fiction projects interrupted and reshaped by major armed conflicts across the world. This account of an artist-activist’s attempt to stop the construction of a hen production facility in rural Solniki ultimately abandons its premise, turning instead into a makeshift meditation on an artist’s duty to a cause that conflicts with the urge to create and evolve.

Following Polish puppeteer Łukasz Puczko, still recovering from a career setback dealt by the COVID-19 pandemic, Deja chronicles his construction of a two-meter biomechanical hen named Marysia. Meant as a symbolic protest against the industrial development in his native village, Puczko’s da Vincian bird faces an impatient organizing committee lobbying against the factory.

Lacking the proximity to the unnamed corporate interest looming over the region, Deja points the camera to the organizing committee for a more tangible adversary. Their overbearing insistence that the hen be finished fast, for a timely protest against the industrial farm assembly, reduces the scope to an artist racing against a deadline. Red posters protesting the construction are plastered all over town, almost like warning signs that a dragon slumbers in the nearby mountain, one that no one has seen for centuries.

While the Russian invasion of Ukraine sidetracks Marysia’s construction, it presents a lucky draw in Deja’s struggling observational arc. The residents of Solniki begin welcoming the refugees, as the promise of the hen saving the town diminishes and the enthusiasm of the locals never materializes. In hosting a Ukrainian family of three, Łukasz gains an apprentice in young Sabina Bohynska and the two join efforts in delivering Marysia to an eager committee accompanied at times by a farcical score composed by Stefan Wesołowski. A combination of the cinematic sequences and the intimately shot recordings by the subject are interjected with the multi-seasonal landscape shots of Solniki. A quiet corporate threat creeps in against pristine rivers and the countryside idyll, perhaps too quietly given what’s at stake.

Having fallen short of Deja’s ambition to have the protest (and Marysia) actualize a halt to the industrial project worthy of BBC coverage, she follows the craftsman-apprentice duo to Western European puppetry festivals. This abrupt reframing of her subject against a rising career arc comes off as improvised. At the end, steeped in the atmosphere of a road trip through an urban Netherlands carnival and a French Alps festival, people of Solinki and their dragon become an afterthought.

Underneath the winding direction lies perhaps the only constant element–Puczko’s undying commitment to puppeteering, and a portrait of a man fluent in leaps of faith that have more often than not ended in freefall, as he recovers from puppetry festival closures, debts and failed endeavors sidetracked by the pandemic. Joanna Deja’s quixotic project meets a harsh truth: unlike Cervantes’s knight, she pursues her doomed quests burdened by a biomechanical hen weighing half a carcass.

Director: Joanna Deja
Writers: Joanna Deja
Cast: Łukasz Puczko, Sabina Bohynska
Running Time: 76 minutes
Country: Poland
Year: 2025

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