Give Me the Backstory: Get to Know Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurb, the Filmmakers Behind Agent of Happiness

By Lucy Spicer

One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Festival is having a front-row seat for the bright future of independent filmmaking. While we can learn a lot about the filmmakers from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival through the art that these storytellers share with us, there's always more we can learn about them as people. This year, we decided to get to the bottom of those artistic wells with our ongoing series: Give Me the Backstory!

Co-directors Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurb met the protagonist of their film Agent of Happiness, which premiered in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, quite by chance. In fact, they were in the process of filming a different project altogether. A few years ago while making The Next Guardian, we had an accidental encounter with two happiness surveyors who walked into the house of our characters. One of the agents was Amber, recounts Bhattarai. While witnessing him for the first time, we were immediately drawn toward him because of his childlike humor and warm personality. We couldn't help but stay in touch.

Amber is an agent whose job is to survey the level of people's happiness in order to measure the Gross National Happiness index for the government in Bhutan. We were inspired by this concept and wanted to look behind the happiness index statistics and focus on the people and see what can and can not be measured in life, explains Zurb . Due to its isolation, Bhutan is often exoticized by Western media as the last Shangri-La, a hidden Buddhist kingdom where everyone is happy. Our intention was to dig deeper and get a local insight into GNH through personal stories in order to show the audience a more complex vision about it.

Agent of Happiness follows Amber as he listens to people from varying lifestyles discuss the ways in which they find contentment. Along the way, Bhattarai and Zurb see Amber reflect on his own loneliness and personal search for happiness. Read on to gain more insight into the documentary and its co-directors, including how Bhattarai and Zurb fell in love with cinema and their favorite part of making Agent of Happiness.

LINK:	https://www.sundance.org/blogs/give-me-the-backstory-get-to-know-arun-...
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