Hukkle

A small village in Hungary. An old man sits by the road hiccupping and goes on hiccupping through the film. The camera moves around the village: a woman cooks, bees fly, a cat catches something, a tractor passes, there is a wedding. Something is happening among these ordinary images and nobody mentions it: the men of the village are dying. György Pálfi writes and directs in his first film. There is no dialogue. The characters do not speak; there is only sound, the hiccup, animals, engines and a folk song. The narrative runs entirely on image and sound design. The idea is to make the viewer a witness. The murders are not shown, not explained, and there is no investigation; the clues are hidden inside ordinary scenes and noticing them is the audience's work. Behind the story is a real case: an episode in a Hungarian village at the start of the twentieth century in which women poisoned their husbands and dozens of deaths came to light. The camera is constantly moving and goes inside objects and animals; some shots have the texture of a nature documentary. It runs about seventy five minutes. Who it is for: viewers who like formal experiment and Hungarian cinema. Who it is not for: there is almost no narrative, nothing is explained, and anyone waiting for a plot will not know what they watched.