Nagvlug Films has released the international trailer for Hen, after the arthouse horror won the top prize at the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival, one of the world’s leading festivals for genre cinema.
Hen is the first African film to win the H.R. Giger Narcisse Award for Best Feature Film in the festival’s 25-year history. South African writer-director Nico Scheepers was in Switzerland to collect the award, which carries a CHF 10,000 prize. Previous Narcisse winners include Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, Gaspar Noé’s Climax, Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow, Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room and André Øvredal’s Troll Hunter – all now regarded as genre classics.
Set on an isolated farm, Hen follows a man who finds a boy locked inside a wooden chest, surrounded by dead bodies, and takes him home to his wife.
This is the 10th award for Hen, hailed by Cineuropa as “powerful and mysterious,” by Daily Maverick as “a masterclass… likely to haunt you long after the credits roll,” and by Netwerk24 as “probably the darkest film made in Afrikaans to date.”
Hen is presented by kykNET Films and produced by Nagvlug Films (My F*k, Marelize!).
Silence and survival
Much of the film draws on Scheepers’ childhood growing up on a remote farm in Limpopo. “Silence and survival shaped everything,” he says. “If the freezer was empty, we loaded the rifle. The smell of gunpowder, the weight of steel, the sight of something alive taking its last breath – this was my childhood. That silence, that isolation, is where Hen comes from. This film asks what happens when the thin layer of civilisation peels away and only instinct remains.”
The period horror is filmed in striking black-and-white, giving the film a stark, mythic quality. “We wanted to strip away time until the story feels unearthed, almost archaeological,” says Scheepers.
Festival accolades
The Neuchâtel win is the latest in a string of festival accolades for South Africa’s Afrikaans-language film industry: Variations on a Theme won Best Film at Rotterdam in February, The Heart Is A Muscle won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Berlin last year, and Koek was nominated for an International Emmy for Best Drama in 2025.
“Hen is the first African film to win the top prize at Neuchâtel but I doubt it will be the last,” says Zandré Coetzer, Nagvlug Films’ co-founder and producer. “Our industry is export-ready and we are excited to see more films from South Africa presented on the global stage.”
What: Hen
WS
