A single unfair punishment sends a mother and daughter chasing an impossible dinner in this hand-drawn French-Italian animated musical.
What is Chicken for Linda! about?
Paulette snaps at her daughter Linda over something small, and the guilt of it will not let her go. To make amends she promises Linda the one dish the girl has been craving: chicken with peppers, a recipe Paulette has never once cooked in her life. What follows is a scrappy, tender chase across a city gripped by a general strike, as an unlikely crew of relatives, neighbors, and one very determined bird get pulled into the search for ingredients. The film keeps its stakes small and its heart large, using songs to carry feeling the dialogue leaves unsaid, and it trusts a child's-eye view of grief and love to hold the whole story together without ever tipping into sentimentality.
About the cast
The voice cast is led by Mélinée Leclerc alongside Clotilde Hesme, Laetitia Dosch, Estéban, Patrick Pineau, Claudine Acs, Jean-Marie Fonbonne, and Antoine Momey, an ensemble drawn largely from French screen and stage work who bring warmth and comic timing to a script that leans on rhythm as much as line reading.
Context & significance
Directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, the film pairs loose, expressive linework with a score built for singing rather than background mood, a combination that has made it a festival favorite since its 2023 debut. As a France-Italy co-production, it sits in a European animation tradition that favors handmade texture over polish, closer in spirit to a sketchbook than a studio house style, and its musical numbers double as emotional shorthand for a mother and daughter who are better at feeling things than saying them.
Watching Chicken for Linda! on Ktime
Chicken for Linda! streams on K-Time with a free account login, and the Persian dub and Persian subtitles are both available, so families can watch in Farsi or follow the original French with Persian text on screen — part of K-Time's broader push to make festival animation genuinely accessible to Farsi-speaking households.