Agent of Happiness
Asian Cinema
•
1h 33m
Directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó | 93 mins | 2024
How do you measure joy? For Bhutan—a nation that conceptualized a “gross national happiness" in 1972 and has collected data on its citizens’ satisfaction for almost two decades—the answer might just be mathematical. But the truth is hardly ever so simple, as the two Bhutanese census workers at the heart of this gentle travelogue come to learn. The pair journey through their country’s verdant pastures and alpine landscapes, polling a cross-section of residents to assign each a happiness score. What begins as a numerical exercise soon becomes a poetic patchwork of daily life and its discontents.
Up Next in Asian Cinema
-
A Girl Missing
Directed by Kōji Fukada | 111 mins | 2019
As the carer for the elderly Toko, home nurse Ichiko is practically a member of the family, favored especially by the bedridden woman’s granddaughters. But Ichiko’s life—and identity—come unspooled after the abduction of Saki, the younger of the two girls... -
Farewell My Concubine
Directed by Kaige Chen | 171 mins | 1993
Art and life become inextricably entwined in Chen’s gorgeously arrayed triumph of costume and production design: an epic spanning 50 years of 20th-century Chinese history in the life of a troupe of Peking opera actors based on the 1985 Lilian Lee novel, an...