ÉCU FILM FESTIVAL, 2025
Anna Benner
chicken
Festival Screening
7 Parnassiens – Grande Salle
11, May 2025
Session 7 - 16:41
April, 24, 2025
A woman who is escaping an abusive situation stumbles and finds herself eye to eye with a hen who is in the same situation. Even though they are separated by a fence as well as by species they develop a mutual understanding based on the outward shared symptoms of their pain: sore skin. In the moment of their connection we see flashbacks to the origin of their pain. As the woman smokes a cigarette to calm her nerves, she and the chicken come up with a plan: to set the world on fire to match their burning skin. The fire may be imaginary but nevertheless it soothes and provides catharsis.
Hi Anna, thank you for talking with The New Current. Are you looking forward having your your film Chicken at ÉCU this May?
Thank you so much. Yes I’m very much looking forward to ECU.
What does it mean to you to have Chicken in the European Animation Category?
I feel very honoured to compete alongside beautiful films.
You are the 2014 winner of the Festivals Connexion Award - Région Rhône-Alpes with Lumières Numériques for Through the Hawthorn. What did winning this award mean to you?
Ha, that takes me back. The award was given at the Annecy festival, the biggest gathering of animators, which was pretty special. And the award being from a network of amazing festivals felt like an extra honour.
How important are festivals like ÉCU in champion and supporting independent films and filmmakers?
Festivals are everything! As short film makers they are our main way to have our films seen the way they’re meant to be seen in the cinema - as well as a beautiful way to connect with audiences. To me, festivals feel like a reward for the long and lonely process of making a film.
Can you tell me a little bit about how Chicken came about, what inspired your latest animation?
The initial inspiration for chicken were two newspaper articles about fires that I read around the same time. One was about a trial in which the judge pronounced a man not guilty for setting his ex-girlfriend’s house on fire because it was deemed “a crime of passion”. That was the starting point for thinking about the themes of gendered violence in my film. The other article was about birds of prey in Australia that hunt by setting parts of the bush on fire to flush out mice and other small animals. That image of a bird carrying fire really stuck with me, and formed the first image I drew for my film. Of course in my case it became a chicken instead. That decision was pretty immediate and instinctive, partly because I love watching chickens move and partly because they fit so well into my world of domestic, everyday stories.
How essential is the creative collaboration between you and your team?
While I did much of the film on my own, the moments I loved the most were the ones when I got to work with other creatives. For my process I film video before I translate it into animation which brings with it the opportunity to work with actors. Monique Squeri, my longtime friend and collaborator, played the character of the woman with so much emotion. The shot where she is smoking and laughing and crying was completely Monique’s idea and performance, and to me it is the heart of the film.
Working on music and sound is always my favourite part of making a film. It’s where my visual language becomes fully dimensional. I’ve worked with my core team, Raphael Tschernuth (music) and Michal Krajczok (sound) for years, and I love their willingness to follow me into my world and their creative ideas and suggestions. The music was particularly important for me in this film as I knew very early on I wanted to play with string instruments, and their different modes of sound for the different states of emotion. We got to work with Chiharu Bley, a very talented Cellist, who gamely played all those angry wild pizzicato beats as well as the soaring strings at the end. The final member of the team was Darren Williams, who recorded the male voice with us, and improvised some rather gruesome dialogue with me. I’m so grateful for all of them to trust my vision and follow me into the darkness of the story.
Do you allow yourself much flexibility with screenplay once you start working on an animation like Chicken?
The degree of flexibility depends on the project. That said, I don't work very much with screenplays. The story usually gets shaped in the storyboard and animatic. With chicken I was able to work in a loose and instinctive way because I was working on the animation by myself so I kept it quite open until the very end.
What was the biggest challenges you faced realising Chicken?
As amazing as this freedom is that comes with working on my own it’s also probably the biggest challenge. I had to summon all my stubbornness to make the film happen.
Of course there are also production and distribution challenges that come with making a film outside of the funding structures. I tried to raise funds but all my applications were rejected.
Looking back now, is there anything you would have done differently on Chicken?
Of course there are things that I see that could work better in the film, but I think the film has become the film that it wanted and needed to be, so I’m not sure that I would change anything. I would have loved to be able to pay my collaborators better (I made sure to pay them but it was small fees) so making the film with funding would have been amazing, but I also appreciate how odd it was allowed to be because it was made on a shoestring budget.
Have you always had a passion for animation?
I grew up watching cartoons like everyone else, but I didn’t really fall in love with animation until I was doing my degree. I studied illustration and we had these electives where we got to try other art forms, and I chose animation, mostly out of curiosity. That’s where I was introduced both to the practice and to the world of artistic animation short films which I then continued to watch as much as I could at the London film and animation festivals and on DVDs borrowed from the school library.
What is it about film as a medium that interests you so much and who are the filmmakers that have inspired you?
Since I got my first taste of animation I’ve never really looked back. I love the way that it takes drawing (or sculpture, 3d modelling etc) and completes it with dimensions of sound and time. I still get a kick out of playing back scenes I animate and see the movement. I’ve recently been making a few installation pieces with animation which is also really fun, but the cinema is my first love for animation. It’s such a special place that can hold people’s attention in a way that we get to experience so rarely these days.
For chicken I took a lot of direct inspiration from painting, I spent hours in London with paintings by Turner and Rothko, which I think you can see in the film.
When it comes to filmmakers, Joanna Quinn is a huge inspiration to me, both in her animation work and her activism for Gaza.
Another filmmaker I have been very inspired by is Jerzy Kucia. I feel very lucky to have had many conversations with him about my films and their delicate problems as he calls it.
What has been the most valuable lessons you have taken from making Chicken and how will these help you with future projects?
It’s been a long process with a lot of doubts - and the animatic and storytelling was very messy at times. I sometimes lost faith in the project a bit, but ultimately I had the trust that it would work out. While I was struggling I often looked back at some animated scenes I did really early on in the process and that kept me going. So to my current and future self I’d say: trust the process, keep drawing and it’ll work out.
"I really wanted to show this kind of intense anger that comes with the pain of a terrible relationship, and offer an imaginary escape from it."
What does your work say about you and the way you see the world?
I find the banalities of daily life very interesting, much more than the big dramatic stories.
So in chicken, e.g. we never see what the fight between the couple was about, or much about their relationship at all. We just see the aftermath, the emotional impact of it. I really wanted to show this kind of intense anger that comes with the pain of a terrible relationship, and offer an imaginary escape from it. In general I like telling the undramatic stories around a dramatic one - my next film is about war, but we never see any fighting or action, just how daily life is shaped by the deprivations.
What has been the best advice you’ve been given by a fellow filmmaker and is there any advice you would offer a new filmmaker?
The most recent great advice I got was from Shira Avni in a conversation about animated documentary: if the visual part isn’t quite working, look into whose perspective the story is told from, and how the emotions of the film can shift by shifting the perspective to a different character.
I have three pieces of advice I’d like to share:
1. Animate chickens, because they move without in-betweens.
2. In your team, talk about how to split money from funding, prizes or sales before you have any money.
3. And this is the main one: focus on the projects you have real passion for, rather than something you think will please audiences or prospective employers. The passion tends to shine through and elevate your film or illustration or painting from the soup of visual overload we live in.
And finally, what is the message you would like your audiences to take from Chicken?
What do we burn when our world is already on fire? I wouldn’t particularly recommend committing arson IRL, but I hope that women can take a bit of emotional catharsis from the power of the fire in the film and maybe find small ways they too can liberate themselves. I’d also like to send love, solidarity and strength to women suffering under patriarchal oppression in Palestine, Afghanistan and everywhere.