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GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS

GYALYONG GAKI PELZOM

By Arun BHATTARAI, Dorottya ZURBÓ

MATCH FRAME PRODUCTIONS KFT - as PROD

Documentary - Development 2022

Amar and Gunaraj are Happiness Agents working for the Bhutan’s Happiness Ministry. They travel door-to-door measuring people’s happiness, while searching for their own. Through encountering various people, this satirical road movie discovers the real desires of a society behind a national identity.

- Year of production
- 2022
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- BHUTAN
- Budget
- 0 - 0.3 M$
- Duration
- 80 mn
- Director(s)
- Arun BHATTARAI, Dorottya ZURBÓ
- Synopsis
- In a faraway country Happiness Agents are working for the Ministry of Gross National Happiness (GNH). They are collecting data for the Happiness Survey in order to create 5-year-happiness plans to increase the Happiness Index of the society. It is hard to imagine that a country like this really exists in our modern world. But in Bhutan, considered to be the last Buddhist Kingdom, everything is about Happiness!
  The film follows two Happiness Agents, Amar and Gunaraj who travel from door to door in remote villages finding out how happy people really are. Through their journey, we encounter everyday people from different social classes, while we also get to know their personal stories and aspirations. They ask questions like how much they rate their own happiness, how many cows they have, whether they quarrel with their neighbours, how strong they believe in Karma or how frequently they meditate. Through a mosaic of various stories we meet different people like Lily Wangchuk (50), a politician whose dream is to become Bhutan’s first woman prime minister, Ugyen Dorji (24), a road worker who stays in a mismatched tent at the edge of a cliff and dreams of his own home one day, Dechen Seldon (28), a transgender woman who performs every night in a club in Thimphu as the main attraction for drunk men and dreams about opening her own club and Tshering Dema (13), who lives up in the mountains and takes care of her family’s yaks, and dreams about going to school. These are just some of the people Amar and Gunaraj encounter as we follow them with a keen eye for the subtle, bittersweet moments.
  Amar and Gunaraj are an odd couple, just like the Bhutanese Laurel and Hardy. While Gunaraj is a serious family man, Amar is a relentless romantic, who dreams about finding a wife one day. His day job is to document happiness in others’ lives, but he is in search of his own. Meanwhile through the national TV we see GNH history from the kings’ speeches, the often cheesy GNH songs and the endless educational programs about GNH. This film is a heart-warming, multi-layered exploration of what happiness means to individuals, as opposed to what it means to a nation. On a broader level, it questions happiness rankings in general, but on a personal level it searches for happiness in the smallest of places.
- Partners & financing
- Dhaka DocLab, Docedge Kolkata, Tribeca Film Institute Network Market, IEFTA
- Production schedule
- The project is in the development phase. Dorottya travelled to Bhutan in October 2019 and joined Arun to research and work on the concept. That time they found Amar and Gunaraj, the protagonists of the film and had a few days of fruitful pre-shooting. In July and August 2020 Amar and Gunaraj are going on a “survey trip” for a month, which is a very important event and we intend to shoot it entirely. During this time through the encounters of the protagonists the directors will also meet some of the supporting characters for “mosaic stories” who they would like to film for a longer period. In Fall 2020 we are planning to edit a trailer, which represents the final concept and the visual language of the film and revise the written material in order to start our applications for further production grants. From January till March 2022 we plan to have three shooting periods: a spring (March-May 2021) and a summer (June-September 2021) and a winter (December- February 2022). From March 2022 till August we intend to edit the film and have the post-production in Hungary. We are planning to premiere the film at IDFA 2022, followed by a rich festival circuit.
- Beginning of shooting
- Aug 25, 2020
- End of shooting
- Mar 01, 2022