South African filmmaker Nico Scheepers has made history at one of the world’s leading genre cinema festivals, becoming the first African director to win the H.R. Giger Narcisse Award for Best Feature Film.
Scheepers travelled to Switzerland to collect the award for his arthouse horror Hen at the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival, which has been running for 25 years. The prize includes CHF 10 000 (approximately R210 000).
The win places Hen alongside previous Narcisse winners including 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 considered genre classics.
10th award for Afrikaans-language film
This marks the 10th award for Hen, which has been praised by Cineuropa as “powerful and mysterious” and by Daily Maverick as “a masterclass… likely to haunt you long after the credits roll”. Netwerk24 described it as “probably the darkest film made in Afrikaans to date”.
The international jury at Neuchâtel commended the film for “its striking portrayal of an insidious evil that takes hold of a devout community against an apocalyptic backdrop, brought to life by remarkably skilful direction and the unforgettable perspective of a young boy”.
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. The film has won awards across multiple departments at Silwerskerm, including cinematography, editing, sound design, makeup and hair, and costume design.
Stripped-back approach creates tension
Cinematographer Chris Lotz shot the period horror in black and white, giving the film what Scheepers describes as a timeless quality. “We wanted to strip away time until the story feels unearthed, almost archaeological,” he said.
Sound designer Tim Pringle took a similarly minimal approach. The film’s first dialogue arrives 18 minutes in, and there is no musical score. “With no score, only wind, birds and creaking wood, every sound becomes unbearable,” Scheepers said. “I find the silence of isolation far more terrifying than a jump scare. There’s a big difference between a cheap physical fright and something that slowly bores into your brain like a maggot.”
Much of the film draws on Scheepers’ childhood growing up on a remote farm in Limpopo. “Silence and survival shaped everything,” he said. “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 was my childhood. That silence, that isolation, is where Hen comes from.”
Part of growing international recognition
The Neuchâtel win continues a strong run for South Africa’s Afrikaans-language film industry on the international circuit. 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 in 2025, and Koek was nominated for an International Emmy for Best Drama in 2025.
“This is the first African film to win the top prize at Neuchâtel but I doubt it will be the last,” said Zandré Coetzer, co-founder and producer at Nagvlug Films, which produced Hen. “Our industry is export-ready and we are excited to see more films from South Africa presented on the global stage.”
Stian Bam won the Silwerskerm Best Actor award for his role as Dawid, competing against co-star and newcomer Dawian van der Westhuize, who played Lukas. Amalia Uys, nominated for Best Actress at the South African Film and Television Awards last year for Tuiskoms, was also nominated for her role as Hanna. The cast workshopped the story from a 17-page treatment rather than a traditional screenplay.
Waldimar Pelser, channel director for premium channels at MultiChoice, a CANAL+ company, said: “It gave the kykNET team great satisfaction to commission a film like Hen. Here is a piece of art which not only sweeps us away with magisterial cinematography and visceral performances, it also unnerves its viewers.”
Hen is presented by kykNET Films and produced by Nagvlug Films, the same production company behind My F*k, Marelize!, which set a post-COVID box office record locally. The same weekend as the Neuchâtel win, both Hen and Scheepers’ play Leefbaar won awards at the Vrystaat Arts Festival.
Nagvlug Films will release two new films at Silwerskerm in August before they open in South African cinemas in September: Scheepers’ Landmyn and Coetzer’s Silas en die Ysbeer op Tafelberg.
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