The Eye of the Hen is a story of violence and isolation without precedent in the Italian film industry. After twenty years as a filmmaker, with her best film released to critical acclaim and by some deemed a masterpiece that would cement her reputation with mainstream audiences as well, Antonietta De Lillo suffered an injustice that stopped her career in its tracks and relegated her to the backwaters of the industry, where she would be barred from making another feature film. Taking the form of a self-portrait, the film freely revisits the life and career of its subject, nearly forty years after her first film. The irony of her story is reflected in the overturning of our expectations when we see how the eye of a hen works: for those who didn’t know, it closes ‘upside-down’, from bottom to top. By the same token, the filmmaker herself, shut out of the industry, stubbornly swims against the tide, her struggle a testament to the cultural and artistic virtues of cinema, which she also shows to be a healing tool and an antidote to an unwarranted isolation.