Agent of Happiness, a Bhutanese-Hungarian documentary by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó, up for Oscars, delves into Bhutan’s happiness metric to ask if one can truly put a number on something so profound
Agent of Happiness, the 90-minute documentary, and a road movie like no other, follows two “happiness agents” — Amber Gurung and Guna Raj Kuikel — as they travel door to door, from central towns to remote corners, assigning “happiness” scores to people. A country that prioritises and builds its policies around a parameter they call ‘Gross National Happiness Index’ [GNHI], Bhutan has been cause for both intrigue and envy to outsiders. However, directors Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó aren’t interested in unpacking the inner mechanics of the system. Instead, they use this unique and often whimsical process of happiness measurement as a lens to uncover the human stories that lie beneath the numbers.
The film instantly draws you in. The sweeping landscapes of rural Bhutan unfold to a soothing yet playful background score, as Amber and Guna Raj embark on their journey, taking viewers into the homes and lives of the people they encounter. Bhattarai and Zurbó’s meeting with the two happiness agents was serendipitous. They first met seven years ago while shooting their previous documentary, The Next Guardian, set around a 1,000-year-old Bhutanese monastery, where the agents’ appearance was incidental. “We instantly fell in love with Amber — he was funny, friendly and a good listener. At the time, we had no plans of making this film, but we stayed in touch,” Bhattarai shares over a Zoom interview.
The pursuit of happiness
As the directors toured festivals with The Next Guardian, they found themselves fielding frequent questions about Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index. “We realised that’s what people associate Bhutan with, and that sparked the idea for this film,” says Bhattarai. Reflecting on his connection to the GNHI concept, Bhattarai recalls first learning about it in school. “Even though we were aware of its uniqueness, at that age, we don’t think much of it — it’s just a shared identity and philosophy that binds our country. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to make the film: to examine it more closely.”
It’s a rare art to balance humour with poignancy, something that this film masters well. “Are you rich in goats?” asks the happiness agent to a farmer. The survey itself is an intriguing mix of the mundane and the profound, contained in 148 questions across nine categories. From inventorying household items like tractors, mobile phones, radios and so on, to those prompting deeper reflections such as “do you feel jealousy or anger?” “How do you sleep?” “What makes you happy?” — the film journeys through the external and internal lives of the subjects they follow. A village woman beams with joy at the family cow having given birth, while another man contemplates the fleeting happiness of sipping coffee outdoors, only to return home and feel the weight of loneliness. A labourer offers a more pragmatic yet serene perspective — “We have to work, whether happy or sad,” she says with a content smile, free of angst.
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The film’s overarching narrative, however, remains Amber’s own pursuit of happiness, which at the time of its making, was contained in two things — finding love and getting back his citizenship. In the late 1990s, during a violent and ethnic unrest against the government, the Lhotshampa people living in Bhutan who had their roots in Nepal, were expelled and lost their citizenship. Amber — just two years old at the time — was one of them. His anguish deeply resonated with Bhattarai, who also shares the same history. “Amber and I understood each other very well. A friendship grew off the camera for over two years, during which he expressed his desire to tell his story. This is also the first time a Nepali character is the main protagonist in a Bhutanese film, which adds value to his story, making it even more special to him and all of us. Moreover, this chapter of Bhutanese history is not talked about. And this is also the first Bhutanese film that addresses the citizenship struggles of the Nepali ethnic community,” says the 39-year-old director.
Connecting with their subjects off camera had a profound impact on making the film the deeply resonant experience that it is. While filming began in 2019, Covid-19 pushed the pause button, during which Bhattarai returned to Amber and a few other characters, to go deeper into their physical surroundings and inner worlds. “When filming the surveys, we just rolled — which also must have felt strange for the people but mostly, they were okay with it. But with the characters we chose to focus on beyond the survey, it was about gaining their trust, by spending time with them without the camera. After some time, you begin to understand their lives better, and you know how and where to place yourself and capture their lives as they are living it. Bhutanese people are shy; it takes them a while to open up. But for some, the experience was almost therapeutic — having never had the chance to share vulnerable feelings, they poured their hearts out.”
The absence of suffering from sadness
Language also played into this in thought-provoking and amusing ways, observes Zurbó. “English is a common language of communication in Bhutan, which was certainly helpful to me. The happiness survey itself has questions in English, but there are around 40 dialects spoken across the country, especially in rural areas. Villagers, for instance, don’t understand a word like ‘depression’. The happiness agents had to find ways to explain it,” said the director, in a post-screening interview at the Zsigmond Vilmos Film Festival in Szeged, Hungary, where the film won an award. Filming in Bhutan was fraught with challenges too. “It was difficult to shoot at high altitudes — a 200 km distance takes 12 hours; many roads are washed away during monsoons. Also, there aren’t any rental companies for cameras or cables, which meant that if something were to go wrong, we’d probably have to fix it in Hungary,” she says with a laugh. “It was the biggest adventure of my life, and the people stayed in my heart.”
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Zurbó and Bhattarai have worked closely for over a decade, having met in Europe during a documentary filmmaking programme. But it’s not easy to make a film together when you’re 8,000 km apart. When the pandemic hit, Zurbó couldn’t stay on for filming. They then devised a system wherein she would simultaneously edit the film in Budapest, as Bhattarai continued shooting it in Bhutan, until both could join forces again, in person. The result is an editing marvel. The film doesn’t gloss over people’s problems — we go through the whole montage, be it poverty, alcoholism, marital troubles, the grief of lost love and the melancholy of chasing love. The detailing is so granular and the handling so delicate that every little story manages to make a dent. And the irony of a man waiting for his citizenship measuring the happiness levels of the whole country, never leaves you.
Earlier this month, the film had a theatrical release in the US, and it has already qualified for the Oscars race, as an independent documentary. After debuting at Sundance in January, and a theatrical release in 20 countries, the film has been enjoying a triumphant run in the festival circuit winning awards, including a special mention award at MAMI. Delighted as they are with the response, it’s not something they quite expected. Bhattarai says, “One of the compliments I cherish most about the film is how it made viewers look back on forgotten joys that once made them happy. Making people reflect is a triumph.”
Everyone looks happy on the outside until one asks the right questions. Poetic, pragmatic, funny and deep, the film gently examines the impossibility of quantifying something as profound and fleeting as happiness. The characters, in their simplicity and grace, embody the Buddhist philosophy that happiness is found in the absence of suffering from sadness. Despite their losses and longings, they remain content and resilient in their hope for a new day. There may be a wistful melancholic vein running through the stories, but the overall happiness index remains high in this one.
