Hichki (2018)

Interesting facts

• Box office: ₹2.2B
• Budget: ₹200M
• Earned 10.8× its budget

Hichki is a 2018 Indian Hindi-language comedy drama film co-written and directed by Siddharth P. Malhotra. It is produced by Aditya Chopra and Maneesh Sharma under the banner of Yash Raj Films. Based on American motivational speaker Brad Cohen's autobiography Front of the Class, it stars Rani Mukerji as Naina Mathur, an aspiring teacher who gets rejected by many schools due to her Tourette syndrome, until she is accepted at the St. Notker's School, her alma mater. She is assigned to teach students from a nearby slum in the class 9F, which was created by the Government of India to fill a quota for the underprivileged.

Production

In 2013, Siddharth P. Malhotra acquired the rights to Brad Cohen's 2005 autobiography Front of the Class and started writing the screenplay along with Ambar Hadap and Ganesh Pandit. The film was titled Hichki, which Malhotra felt was a suitable word for describing prejudice and social stigma against Tourette disorder.

While Malhotra had conceived of the film as a male-led film when writing the screenplay, Sharma suggested casting an actress as the lead. Rani Mukerji was chosen, marking her first acting role since Mardaani in 2014. She revealed that she accepted the film because she found the role to be more challenging than those in her previous films.

Hichki was produced on a budget of ₹200 million (equivalent to ₹290 million or US$3.0 million in 2026). Principal photography began in Mumbai on 4 April 2017. Because this was her first on-screen project since her daughter's birth, Mukerji confessed that she was worried about leaving her daughter for the first time. Mukerji added, "... she had not spent even one day without me.

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