Hungarian-Bhutanese Co-production Shortlisted for Top Documentary Award

Dorottya Zurbó and Arun Bhattarai’s documentary Agent of Happiness has been selected by the International Documentary Association (IDA) as one of the twenty best recent documentaries to be nominated for the IDA Documentary Award. The film, a Hungarian-Bhutanese co-production supported by the National Film Institute, had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and was a great success in domestic cinemas.

The American IDA Documentary Awards is the world’s most prestigious documentary forum, honoring the best non-fiction documentary films of a given year, Magyar Nemzet writes. This year, the Los Angeles-based IDA received a record number of entries, totaling over 700. Shortlisting is also a key milestone on the road to an Academy Award nomination in the documentary category.

The documentary team of directors Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó followed the life of Amber Gurung, a happiness agent in her 40s. In Bhutan, a tiny Himalayan kingdom of just 700,000 people, staff from the Happiness Research Institute travel the country to measure the happiness levels of the population through a four-hour questionnaire.

The results are used to draw up five-year development plans, the primary aim of which is to further increase the ‘happiness index’ of Bhutanese society.

The tiny kingdom of Bhutan in the eastern Himalayas is famous not only for its breathtaking scenery and rich cultural heritage, but also for a special recognition – it is often called the “land of happiness.” Photo: Pixabay

In the film, Amber visits isolated villages door to door. Through her, the audience get an intimate insight into the daily lives of Bhutanese society: what makes them truly happy, and can happiness really be measured? Throughout the story, viewers not only learn about the aspirations of ordinary people, but also about the personal fate of our protagonist, whose greatest dream is to finally find love.

The documentary is a co-production between Match Frame Productions in Hungary and Sound Pictures in Bhutan, with the support of the National Film Institute, the Sundance Institute in the US, the Catapult Film Fund, the deNovo Initiative and the DMZ Docs Fund in South Korea.

Agent of Happiness was directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó, produced by Veronika Szakonyi Noémi and Artur Vincze Máté, co-produced by Arun Bhattarai, edited by Péter Sass, sound engineered by Rudolf Várhegyi and Tamás Bohács, composed by Ádám Balázs, and produced by Anna Tóth.

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