IMFF ‘25: Agent of Happiness: Learning and Allowing

Agent of Happiness (2024), which screened at Indie Meme Fest 2025 takes place in Bhutan, a beautiful, small country with a unique policy: collecting and analyzing data on the happiness of its people. Gross National Happiness. In service of this policy it sends out Happiness Agents to conduct long interviews with Bhutanese people about various factors in their lives and their satisfaction with them. The overall data is accessible; over the years that directors Bhattarai and Zurbo filmed, Bhutan’s happy share of population was greater than 90%, with about half of those people being “narrowly happy.” What makes it meaningful is that the documentary emphasizes the specific survey participants that it does. The characters are variably happy and give room to learn something about human happiness, even if limited to curated allegories in the documentary. 

The documentary follows two Happiness Agents as they interview various Bhutanese citizens. Each interview takes more than two hours and involves asking a large variety of questions at or near the interviewees residence, so the snippets of data that the Happiness Agents weigh for their happiness scores and that the movie emphasizes, change for each person. The three happiest individuals they depict are a man who loves to wander and owns many cows; a man who sees himself as an upstanding individual with multiple wives that he saved from poverty; and a man who successfully labored to plant one hundred death flags for his deceased wife. In the first two cases, happiness seems to be rooted in material wealth that affords one the ability to act on their desires. The first man’s desires are to wander and generally just be a chiller. The second man’s desires are to prove to himself that he’s a good person despite his general obnoxiousness. In the third case happiness seems to be rooted in something more nuanced. The widower’s happiness comes from his ability to feel like a good husband even after the death of his wife. The common thread across all three cases might be that they are happy because their  basic needs are met while they are also able to align the image of themselves with their lived lives. We also see strong family ties playing a role in two cases, and in at least two other cases, the individual is very comfortable with change. The first man says he prefers Bhutan today to the Bhutan he grew up in, because there are more houses to wander between now, while the widower finds joy in his grandson, who he believes to be the reincarnation of his wife. The film gives us the observations while leaving the synthesis up to us.

One other individual was particularly unhappy: a transgender woman who performs at a local nightclub with an unwaveringly supportive mother. She seems to be supporting herself while maintaining a cadre of enthusiastic fans. At first it might come as a bit of a surprise that she is unhappy, given the common threads we found earlier. Her basic needs are met and she has the support of a family member. However, she is transgender, so the process of aligning her self-image with the life she’s able to live may be more complicated than it is for the three happy cis men the film showed us earlier. She also seems to spend significant amounts of time confined to her bed, not out of some physical limitation but an emotional listlessness. Her mother even jokes once that all she does is lay in her bed. She’s laying in bed as her mother impresses on her insistently that she will die one day and that she’ll have to manage on her own. Her response from under her blankets is silence. Hearing this truth makes her uncomfortable and her bed seems to be a place of comfort to which she retreats from discomfort. Likewise hearing her mother speak like this might make it hard for her to accept change, from the determining factors we’d synthesized earlier. Presumably this sort of bed-ridden escape is also what she’s doing rather than prioritizing a crucial fifth factor of happiness.

The protagonist of the story is Amber Gurang, a Happiness Agent. Amber is on a date with a woman he met on an app when he tells her that they should go to the river on their next date, because being in nature makes people happy. She readily agrees. In Bhutan nature is accessible and is seen generally as something that increases happiness.

Gradually, in an ironic twist, we find out that Amber is not happy. We don’t learn his Happiness Index score the way we do with the people he interviews, and the documentary uses an almost imperceptible touch to tell us why, restraining itself only to making observations about Amber’s life without explicitly addressing its context. He’s an ethnic Nepali living in Bhutan. This is a great time to Google a political map of Asia to see where the two sit in relation to one another. Amber’s family, like most ethnic Nepalis, have been in Bhutan for generations yet are almost entirely excluded from taking the GNH survey. They are not citizens, because citizenship for this minority group was revoked by King Jigme Singye Wangchuck following the 1988 census. By fraction of population, one in six, this was one of the most significant instances of denationalization in modern history. Relative to Bhutan’s size this would be analogous to America denationalizing all African Americans. 

So obviously, Amber is struggling to find happiness. He takes care of his aging mother diligently, and his life dream is to start a family of his own, a humble aspiration for a citizen. When women hear about his citizenship status though, their families accurately identify the practical risks to their daughters’ livelihoods of marrying someone who isn’t legally able to have a steady job, and forbid any further contact with him. There is a clear relationship between the source of his happiness and the thing blocking him from having it.

Amber’s needs are being met. He has a loving mother and spends time in nature, which the film highlights as key factors for happiness. He also sees himself as a family man, though, and his ambitions to start a family are inhibited directly by the government’s refusal to grant his life financial stability. His desired self image is hampered by the very country for which he conducts GNH surveys.

In the post-screening Q&A co-writer, co-director Arun Bhattarai noted that Amber now has his citizenship, showing that all one has to do in order to gain their citizenship in Bhutan is to gain international acclaim while working for the betterment of the country. My only significant critique of the film is its almost extreme subtlety in addressing these observations. But I also get it. Given the monarchy’s recent history, who knows what would happen to the citizenship status of the creative duo behind the documentary if they said something explicitly critical. 

All of this makes for a fascinating narrative. We come to glimpse and maybe even begin to understand something about human nature, via Amber and the people he interviews. If life’s basic goal is to be happy then this documentary is a resonant, populist tool for examining it. Agent of happiness sticks to observation while anchoring itself in narrative. This makes it a fun exercise to take the dots the film offers and to connect them yourself. To me it seems that the basic factors of happiness include strong family ties, exposure to nature, having your basic life needs met, aligning your self image with the life you can live, and comfort with change. These probably aren’t comprehensive, and there’s probably much context, but like with Bhutan, it’s a great start to be paying attention to these things within your own life.