It had to happen sooner or later. Happiness is the new sex, after all. There are new books on how to get more of it almost every month. It’s a burgeoning field of scientific study. And to not want happiness is like – yup, you guessed it – not wanting sex. It’s a basic human drive.
Which explains why there’s a new movie about happiness that is making its way around the planet. On Saturday, Feb. 11, people in more than 600 locations in 60 countries and on seven continents, including Antarctica, got together to watch a screening of a documentary called Happy.
Why then? It was World Happy Day. (I didn’t know, either, if that makes you feel any better.)
The people behind the film came up with the idea of designating a World Happy Day to help ignite a grassroots movement for the documentary, in part by proclaiming it’s a movement even before it becomes a fully fledged one. That method of distribution – through word of mouth, social media, independent theatres and a little help from Lululemon (more on that later) – came about because the documentary failed to pick up a satisfactory distribution deal even though it won awards at several small film festivals last year.
“The offers clearly didn’t see the value of the project,” says Roko Belic, the film’s director. “And we couldn’t put it in the hands of people who didn’t understand it.”
Oh yes, this isn’t just a movie. It’s an evangelical mission to the people who made it. Film has always been the most accessible of media, and this documentary does an excellent job of combining bona fide scientific research with real-life stories of people who have found happiness in ways that subvert the often-unchallenged cultural script of money, car, house and holidays. You can absorb all the most important happiness findings without wading through a meticulously researched book. And best of all, the viewing of a film happens in a group, which facilitates discussion afterward.
Happy began six years ago with a Hollywood-scale disillusionment. Tom Shadyac, prolific comedy director of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Liar, Liar, The Nutty Professor and Bruce Almighty, among others, read an article about happiness in the The New York Times and called up his friend, Mr. Belic, an Academy-Award-nominated documentary director (Ghengis Blues) to ask if he was interested in investigating the idea of well-being.
“Tom understood the paradox of having lots of money and not really being happy,” says Mr. Belic on the phone from California. Both men were also puzzled by the fact that the United States – the country that has the pursuit of happiness in its constitution – ranked No. 23 in the global happiness survey cited in the newspaper article. Mr. Shadyac offered to fund a documentary.
“I thought it would take one year, not six, and I didn’t know that it would change my life,” Mr. Belic says.
In the film, he interviews some of the world’s happiness gurus – Daniel Gilbert, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Tim Kasser, the Dalai Lama – and travels to India, Japan, Denmark, Bhutan, Africa and parts of America to find stories of contented people. It may have become almost cliché to include someone such as the rickshaw driver in Calcutta, who lives in a tent and beams with joy, but it’s hard to dismiss the stories of people who are just like you and me, only less lucky, less well-off and far happier.
