Hot Docs 2024: Agent of Happiness

The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is famous for its Gross National Happiness index, which tracks the happiness of the country’s population rather than its Gross Domestic Product. But how is this GNH determined and what exactly goes into the process of rating a nation’s collective happiness? Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó’s Agent of Happiness answers these questions as it follows the government agents who go door to door across the mountainous country to interview citizens and rate their happiness using dozens of questions pertaining to different aspects of life. It’s a fascinating look at a curious national process and a perceptive interrogation of the very definition of happiness.

The central figure is 40-year-old Amber, a Nepali Bhutanese who is diligent in his work tracking national happiness, but ironically rather unhappy in his own personal life. We follow Amber and his survey partner as they travel through remote villages to interview the country’s rich and poor, old and young, happy and sad. We meet farmers who are ecstatic about their quiet rural lives and the birth of new cows and promise of new income. We meet a rich man with three wives, who beams with pride over his material accomplishments, even as he ignores his wives’ own emotional needs. We meet a 17-year-old girl who cares for her younger sister to ease the load on her alcoholic single mother.

Some of these interviews are shown in brief snippets while others linger as we examine the fascinating particulars of their lives. Each interview ends with an on-screen graphic showing the final rating of the person’s happiness based on how they answered the questions. In this way, the film is almost like a documentary version of Humans of New York but about the Bhutanese countryside.

However, Agent of Happiness is not simply a catalogue of the happiness ratings of the individuals interviewed. It’s also a fascinating window into how each individual person measures happiness. It then contrasts that personal lens with the governmental questions, which focus on material conditions and rural aspects of life: how many cows you own, how many hours of sleep you get each night, how much time you can meditate each week. These things are important for the country’s many farmers and rural workers, but they’re not the be-all and end-all to what constitutes a meaningful life and elide some of the more pertinent aspects of life for urban Bhutanese.

Some key figures, mostly those less happy than the overall national image, come to the fore of the film and the filmmakers linger on them, allowing their stories to breathe. One is a trans nightclub performer who has a tender relationship with her supportive mother, but who is also filled with dread at her mother’s impending death from cancer. This person describes being overwhelmed with fear and anxiety about most aspects of her life, which is sad, but especially when juxtaposed with the supportive domestic moments of her mother offering encouragement and unconditional support for her passions and dreams.

Another key figure is an old, poor farmer who dearly misses his late wife and who dedicates his remaining days to building prayer flags and praying for his wife’s safe passage through the underworld. The man is mostly happy so long as he has rice in his storage containers, as he tells Amber, but he’s also genuinely bereft and lonely. Is he happy? He’s not happy about the loss of his wife, but he has no complaints about his material conditions.

The key figure, however, is Amber, who we learn desperately wants to marry as he is worried he’s growing too old to start a family. The girl he dates wants him to move with her to Australia, but he doesn’t have a passport, a result of his family being stripped of citizenship after ethnic conflict decades earlier. His job is to rate the happiness of Bhutanese citizens, even as that very label is denied him.

From the film’s description and promotional images of the gorgeous nation, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Agent of Happiness shows Bhutan as some kind of paradise, but the film is not one dimensional or merely propaganda for Bhutan as a happy Buddhist enclave. As demonstrated by its focus, it doesn’t shy away from the faults in such a monolithic religious and ethnic approach to national happiness, which leaves people like Amber lost in the shuffle. But it’s also clear-eyed about the fact that people in Bhutan generally rate much happier than people in other nations, unified by its Buddhist identity, its gorgeous natural environment, and its syncretic approach to the modern world, which embraces progressive aspects of modernity without sacrificing the rhythms and rituals of traditional rural life. The film is deceptively complex, and its willingness to simply watch and listen to various people across the country creates a holistic portrait of this nation at this moment in time. The filmmakers never interject or intrude. They simply watch in a classic fly-on-the-wall manner.

It’s also beautifully, if simply, shot. Acting as cinematographer as well as co-director, Bhattarai often frames characters in wide angle against the gorgeous mountain backdrops, or composes lopsided frames, such as with the character in the foreground weighed against an animal crossing in the background. The juxtaposition between what the characters say and what we see through the camera lens is often amusing, such as in an early moment where an old man talks about how much modern Bhutan bustles with construction only to cut to the reverse angle view from his home, which shows a few scattered homes across a forested mountainside and no living thing save a cow in sight.

Agent of Happiness basks in the natural beauty of the nation, making the subtle, if obvious, suggestion that much of the national happiness is simply a result of being born in such a beautiful place—a thought verbalized by a young shopkeeper in the film’s closing minutes, in case we didn’t get the memo. The film is a gentle reminder that there’s always more to the story when a country such as Bhutan touts its national happiness, but that complexity doesn’t erase the general truth of the overall claim. In short, it’s a film with a simple, satisfying documentary approach that captures the complexity of a curious modern nation, and the nuance of its own national success.

8 out of 10

Agent of Happiness (2024, Bhutan/Hungary)

Directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó.

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