Thanks to our friend Sandy at Ecran Large in Paris I got to discover the new short film by filmmaker Kartik Singh (pictured below).

Shankar, a flower seller living in a squalid room in a tenement building with some friends suddenly catches an unending case of the hiccup. He goes out to work everyday but the hiccup is incomodating people around him and his own health starts deteriorating (one can die from this common ailment, absurdly). How will he find relief?

“Hechki” (“hiccup,” in Hindi) is filled with a humanity and a generosity of spirit but never veers into the schmaltz zone–it also poses a terribly vexing problem: how do you get rid of a mega-bad case of the hiccup? Up to you to figure out whatever happens next in this noteworthy twelve-minute short by simply watching it. “Hechki” won me over, and pretty much instantly. There’s an infinite precision and care to the way Singh makes cinema, his way of directing coming across as mature and well thought-through. I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard more about this filmmaker soon.

Watch “Hechki” on Youtube here