'Happiness' tracks the bittersweet transition as an innocent, simpler lifestyle slowly fades to the seduction of technology and progress in the village of Laya, nestled deep in the Himalayan mountainside of Bhutan. Told through the eyes of Peyangki; a captivating and dreamy nine year old boy, who is sent by his mother to study at the local monastery because she cannot afford to raise all six of her children. Beautiful, sad and... inevitable.
Hubert Minel doesn't love his mother. The seventeen-year-old regards her with haughty contempt, and sees only her dated sweaters, kitsch decorations and the breadcrumbs that get stuck on the corner of her lips when she munches. In addition to these irritating surface details, there are also the cherished family mechanisms of manipulation and guilt. Confused by a love/hate relationship which obsesses him more and more each day, and desperate to escape the suffocating atmosphere of his mother's find out more...