“I have a car and a job, but my life is empty without a wife,” Amber confides in “Agent of Happiness,” wearing a pair of sunglasses that make him look as cool as a cucumber, but is anything but from the sound of it. It may look like he’s answering the survey that’s given every five years in Bhutan where a National Happiness Index is a consideration in shaping public policy for the country rooted in Buddhist beliefs, making contentment a top priority. But in fact he’s one of the people working for the government to conduct the survey, driving around the furthest reaches of the Himalayas with his partner Gunaraj in order to make sure everyone is counted and asking questions that may not seem all that intimate, but elicit unusually emotional responses.
Filmmakers Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó knew there was something going on beneath the surface with Amber upon meeting him during the making of their first collaboration “The Next Guardian,” which tracked a young man assuming his place in the monastery that his family watched over for generations, and as it turns out, to follow him around was only to scratch the surface of how people really feel in Bhutan where happiness is far more complicated a subject than what the tourism bureau that suggests it as a rival to Disneyland would have you believe. Bhattarai and Zurbó use Amber’s travels to show how it is a relative concept when so many seemed to have accepted social circumstances they can’t do much to change, whether it’s a 17-year-old woman who suspects it’ll be hard to marry when she takes care of her younger sister and her mother or a village elder who still works from 7 am to 4 pm every day with a salary that hasn’t increased with the cost of living. Amber himself isn’t about to speak to his own issues in front of those he’s polling, but beyond the desire for companionship, he seeks a wife who could provide him with stability when his immigration status is uncertain as a refugee of Lhotshampa and considered to be Nepali rather than Bhutanese, which prevents him from putting down roots in the region he actually grew up in.
Audiences lured into “Agent of Happiness” expecting a breezy entertainment from its title will undoubtedly leave satisfied, but Bhattarai and Zurbó set up as much self-reflection on the part of viewers as they elicit from Amber and all the people he speaks to in his work, both in evaluating where they are in their own lives and accepting the word of others who’ll default to say they’re doing just fine when the reality is more grim. After premiering earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, the film is starting its U.S. theatrical run this week and the filmmakers gracious took the time to talk about their cross-cultural partnership, how they knew they had a star for their next movie in Amber and what has made them happy as they’ve engaged with audiences.
How did this come about?
Arun Bhattarai: It started with an accidental encounter we had with our main protagonist Amber about eight years ago when we were actually doing our previous film. Two happiness agents walked into the house of our characters, and that’s how we actually met Amber and Gunaraj, and then we got very close to Amber because he was such a great listener and at the same time he was very funny. We actually never had the intention to make this film, but we stayed in touch and later when we actually got the idea for this film, we got back to him, and we realized that he himself is in search for love and we thought that’s a really great premise for us to do a film about a happiness agent who is in search of his own happiness.
Dorottya Zurbo: And Arun and I have been working together for the last 11 years because we studied together in an international master program called OpNomads, where we became creative partners, and then we did our first film, “The Next Guardian” in Bhutan. Traveling to festivals with the previous film, somehow we knew that we would like to do something with gross national happiness because that’s always the first association of people about Bhutan, and everyone is curious about this strange happiness policy. We felt the need to do something which goes beyond the stereotypes and maybe gives a more local perspective about how people think about their contentment and happiness. We also knew that the National Happiness Survey is approaching, and that’s when we got the idea that we would like to do something [about] how they measure it and how we can maybe transform the act of measurement into a cinematic experience, but focusing more on the people and all those hidden stories and feelings that the numbers are representing or even contrasting.
With the experience of “The Next Guardian” behind you, is it an interesting dynamic when Arun is from Bhutan and Dorottya has come from another culture in Hungary?
Dorottya Zurbo: Yeah, I think we have a really nice creative partnership, and we grew together as directors, [having] the same film references and helping each other on the exam films. We always felt that we had really great communication and skills that [complement] each other, so after we graduated we decided that we would like to work together because making documentary films can be a very lonely profession, following a character or a subject for several years. I always believe in partnership, and I thought that our creativity added together. We also inspire each other because we come from two different cultural backgrounds and that’s what makes us more reflective on the reality that we are filming because we have different sensitivities. It always triggers our creative discussions – how we perceive it differently, and it was the same case with “Agent of Happiness” because the interpretation of happiness in Bhutan has a totally different connotation than in the Western culture and that’s what we managed to bring together in the film.
When you follow Amber, how much of an idea of a structure did you have in mind when you end up returning to so many of the people that participated in the survey?
Arun Bhattarai: We knew how the survey happens and of course, it was full of surprises like in any other documentary film. After spending a lot of time with Amber, we knew that we wanted to see where his search for love goes, but at the same time through Amber, we knew we wanted to enter into the lives of certain people to make a multi-faceted portrait of the country. We met with really interesting people and we chose people whose stories were resonating in some way with Amber’s own life story for these side characters. It was important for us that we could show a bit of a diversity, like a different age range and people with different social backgrounds, but this idea of going door to door [where] it’s always a spontaneous encounter, we’d never know with whom we are meeting and I think besides resonating to Amber, it was also an important factor choosing the story that people who were able to open up in this situation of the survey. They had something to share at that moment and they felt that they want to pour their heart out. That’s when we felt this magical atmosphere, so it was more of an intuitive process.
Was there anything that happened that changed your ideas of what this was?
Arun Bhattarai: While we were actually getting to know Amber, we always knew that he was searching for love, but he told us about the citizenship much later and because we spent so much time with him, we knew at that time that he would want that aspect to be in the film as well, which was deeply intertwined with his own search for love.
Dorottya Zurbo: Yes, he let us into his more personal life and struggles and that’s when we realized that his personal story connected to a very important social issue in Bhutan. It’s almost like a road movie, traveling with these two agents and we were prepared to see what happens between them on the road, but we also felt that we wanted to give attention to the people who they survey, so we understood in the moment that we want to experiment of this storytelling that time to time we leave the main storyline and we stay with the people and see if it was possible to build up a narrative structure in a bit more unusual way. It was the most difficult dramatic structure that we ever worked on because it’s like a mosaic. We worked on the editing more than a year and tried a lot of different constellations.
Arun Bhattarai: Yes, it’s a character-driven film but at the same time we didn’t want to make this classic character-driven film only through one character. [There’s] this whole Buddhist idea of the circle of life where we return to people, and that was one of the reasons that we wanted to go back to the secondary characters and why we’d also return to Amber.
Visually, you’re able to give people the space to see the stature they have. How did you figure out how to shoot this?
Dorottya Zurbo: We always work in a very small crew, I did the sound and Arun is the cinematographer and also Arun’s brother was helping us on the shoot. Arun has a very specific style of how he is filming reality [already] and because doing the survey is a very long process and a very repetitive situation, throughout following people and doing the test shoots we had time to feel and see what can work. From the beginning, we had this idea to translate this act of the bureaucracy of measuring happiness into cinematic language [where] everyone has an individual happiness profile that they measure and then there is an overall happiness index of the society, so to express this official bureaucratic nature of the survey we created these distant symmetric shots which are almost like a stage. You could also see the environment of the characters and it has a little bit of an official nature and then the happiness index comes when people are facing into the camera, which gives the sense as if they would be also part of a catalogue. We wanted to oppose [that visual idea] with the more lyrical images when we step into the inner life and the inner monologue of people and their everyday life, so we kept those two directions in mind during filming.
What’s it been like to get this film out into the world?
Arun Bhattarai: It has been wonderful taking the film to different people around the world because of course the story takes place in a very remote corner of the world not many people know about still today, but there are people living there whose dreams and whose sadness are very similar to anyone living in any part of the world. And often it evokes questions about the things that used to make you happy and sometimes you forgot along the way. What was so beautiful was these audiences were actually asking these questions which appear in the film to themselves and [wondering] “How much would my score be?” and “What would be the things that would make me happy?” So I think it evokes questions about your own happiness while watching the film and it was a surprise, but that was the beautiful part for us sharing the film.
Dorottya Zurbo: Yeah, since Sundance, we travelled a lot of different places around the world and it’s really rewarding to engage with the audience. It was an extremely good feeling that most of our screenings were a full house and somehow I think the title and [the idea] happiness really attracts people, but all the Q&As became very existential and very emotional because somehow people recognized themselves in the characters. It was really nice to see that the feelings that were important for us or even what we focused on in the film [in terms] of relationships or how to find your acceptance and balance in difficult life circumstances really resonated to people. Whenever I went to the western part of the world, there’s [a feeling that] Bhutan is a distant culture and many things like the Buddhist way of life were not familiar to the audience, but at the same time, they discovered the universal values and that was really rewarding experience because when we made this film, we were also constantly thinking about how it is to lead a happy filmmaker’s life.
“Agent of Happiness” opens on November 1st in New York at the Quad Cinema and November 15th at the Monica Film Center. A full list of theaters and dates is here.