Agent of Happiness
Essential Documentaries
•
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 Essential Documentaries
-
Buffalo Juggalos
Leaving March 1
Directed by Scott Cummings | 30 mins | 2014
Smeared in gaudy face-paint and dedicated as much to the hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse as they are to generalized debauchery and destruction, the Juggalo remains one of fan culture’s most enduring—and most derided—outsider figures. In ... -
Goodbye to Language
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 70 mins | 2014
An innovator to the end, Godard’s penultimate feature finds him experimenting with the possibilities of digital 3D, using the technology to plot the disintegration of both a couple’s relationship and the images of the relationship. A film of unpreceden... -
Portrait of Jason
Directed by Shirley Clarke | 107 mins | 1967
A distillation of a single 12-hour interview in a room at the Chelsea Hotel with the charismatic Jason Holliday (“real” name Aaron Payne), a gay, African American cabaret dancer, part-time hustler, and full-time raconteur, Portrait of Jason grows from ...
