It’s poultry vs people in this darkly comic tale of a problematic pet rooster

When a father bought a baby chick as a plaything for the two cats in his small Mumbai apartment, he expected the bird to be dead within a week. Instead, over the next six months, it became an iron-willed rooster and ‘a full-blown terror in the house’, dominating both animals and people with its self-assured struts, relentless crowing, abrasive pecks and frequent excretions. In Tungrus, the Mumbai-based director Rishi Chandna captures the family’s bizarre relationship with their household’s newest addition, as they ponder whether it’s time for the rooster to go from pet to dinner plate. Darkly funny, Chandna’s short documentary probes the generational divide between Mumbai’s village-raised older generation and its more cosmopolitan younger generation, as well as the strange tension between humans’ love of making animals family members and serving them as a main course.