Guests of Honor: Excerpt from AV-arkki on Vimeo.
Installation view from Heino Gallery december 2024. In addition to the video a series of porcelain plates "for the guests of Honors", describing meals that could be served to chicken, were exhibited.
Guests of Honor
Short film 2024 duration 3:30min
The chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is the most common bird in the world, and it is estimated that there are 30 billion of them. Yet we don’t see them very often. Most chickens spend their short lives in confined, artificially lit plants; they never meet their mother hens, and they are bred to be so heavy that their bodies cannot support them. Chickens are intelligent animals that, when kept in suitable conditions, show affection, feel happy and frustrated, understand time and communicate with each other. The video work Guests of Honor (2024) shows chickens arriving at a dinner table set for them. The work attempts to show this species, usually seen as production animals, as equal to humans and questions the ways in which farm animals are treated. In a world where chickens are classified as products rather than individual animals, it may be considered radical to see them as beautiful.
The video work Guests of Honor has been shown at several festivals, such as Leiden Shorts in Holland, the Minikino Film Week in Indonesia, Kassel Dokfest in Germany and in Sweden at both Uppsala Kortfilmfestival and Nordisk Panorama Market in Malmö. The installation version of the work will be shown for the first time at the Galleria Heino exhibition.
Director, idea & concept, editor, cinematography, postproduction Paula Lehtonen
Music by Rasmus Hedlund
Technical Production Paavo Lehtonen Studio
Assistant director Eero Yli-Vakkuri
Distribution AV-Arkki
Supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
World premiere at Leiden Shorts 2024
