Abbéville, his destination, is a small farming community stuck in the Dark Ages, ruled by the brooding figure of Seigneur Jehan d’Auferre, a feudal overlord who has nothing to gain from the enlightenment of his subjects.

Sheltered from the outside world the villagers are blinkered to the corruption about them, and suspicious of outsiders. The out-dated laws practiced by the local court-house still allow animals to be tried and hanged for capital offences.

When a local child is found murdered and Courtois is called upon to defend the suspect, he refuses. The accused is a pig, and it is obvious to him that the animal is simply the scapegoat for a human culprit.

The pig belongs to Samira, a beautiful Egyptian girl, and one of a group of itinerant travelers who have settled on the outskirts of the town. She tells Courtois that the pig is innocent, and that she and her people are being victimized by the villagers. Courtois finds himself drawn to this mysterious and exotic young woman, and his involvement with her forces him to face the truth.

He decides to investigate the murder, and in doing so uncovers the dark secret of Jehan d’Auferre, which threatens to destabilize the entire community. Courtois risks his own safety in pursuit of the truth but even when the truth seems to have been lost in the fight for self-preservation, nature has its own way of bringing justice to the ignorant.

The Hour Of The Pig is a dark, brooding medieval drama, directed by Leslie Megahey. A co-production between CIBY 2000 and BBC Films with the participation of British Screen and European Co-production Fund.

 In the time since a friend first told him about the ‘animal trials’ of medieval France, Leslie Megahey has become something of an expert on animals in the dock, and is able to cite a whole string of cases in which pets and their owners have been the prime witnesses.

His particular favorite was told to him “by an actress friend of mine.” It involved a rather intimate relationship between a Welsh mountain farmer and one of his sheep. Character witnesses were called for both parties, and the judge finally ruled that the sheep was treated with such kindness and affection that the farmer had, in fact, no case to answer. This, he points out, happened only a couple of years ago.

The pig in Megahey’s new film is not so lucky: it is accused of murder and is accorded due process of law in a small town in medieval France. “There were lots of animal trials in the Middle Ages,” points out the director, “mainly in France in the 15th, 16th and even 17th centuries.”

“Some of them were ecclesiastical: an animal would be tried, and then ax-communicated or anathematized for destroying a harvest. But most of them were civil cases, resulting from an animal running amok and destroying property or killing someone. The animal’s defense was paid for by the state, and it was kept in the same prison as humans while awaiting trial. The law said all prisoners had to be treated in the same way and be given the same food, and that was applied to the animals as well”

The hapless four-footed defendant in The Hour of the Pig belongs to a young gypsy girl called Samira, played by Amina Annabi, a North African singer/actress who made her film debut in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky. She also won the 1991 Edith Piaf Award for Best Female Singer with her album ‘Yalil.’

The fact that the pig’s owner is a gypsy, says Megahey, means that the film is also about the superstitions and jealousies which rule small towns anywhere, as much now as they did in the Middle Ages. “Obviously,” he continues, “the pig is the scapegoat, but what the community is really reacting is one of the first waves of immigrants - the North African gypsies who spread through Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. They were treated with the same suspicion and contempt as a lot of immigrants are treated with today.”

The resulting film, says the director (who also wrote the screenplay), “starts out as a black comedy, but gets pretty serious later.” Apart from Samira and her pig, the main focus is the young defense lawyer, Courtois and the local priest, a surprisingly liberal-minded man ahead of his time, who is played by Ian Holm.

“That, ultimately, is what attracted me to the story,” confesses Megahey: “the originality of it, and the idea of a man on the verge of modernity going to the country for a quiet life and finding himself in the middle of all this craziness. For all its medieval setting, it’s a story which has a lot of surprisingly modern elements: one man against the town; a courtroom drama with a baddie in the form of the prosecuting counsel, who is played by Donald Pleasence; and the old story of the defense counsel who believes his client is innocent but, in order to prove it, has to track down the real guilty party.

“It is also,” he adds, “fairly sexy. They had a very gutsy attitude towards sex in the Middle Ages, and there’s a fair bit of that in it. They were a lot more open about sex than we are today. In fact, there is one scene where a street theatre company comes to town, and I found I had to do quite a bit of bowdlerizing on the original medieval text before I could put it in the film!”

Starring  Colin Firth as Richard Courtois, Amina Annabi as Samira, Jim Carter as Mathieu and  Donald Pleasence as Pincheon.
Screenplay/Directed by Leslie Megahey