What makes you happy? What makes people in your country happy? How about people on the other side of the world? It is the same? Is there a “recipe” for happiness common across cultures and geography? Or do people have different ways of feeling happy? Will all this talking and worrying about happiness make us unhappy?
Photo courtesy of “Happy Laos”
The idea of happiness is both elusive and omnipresent. It’s the topic of books, psychological studies, and even a national policy.
A few months ago a group of my friends here saw The Happy Movie (a documentary that explores happiness around the world), they wanted to know…what about Laos? What makes people here happy? So they decided to find out the simplest way they could–by asking. Individuals and organizations from all across Laos have contributed footage and now they have children, monks, weavers, farmers, and more talking about what happiness means to them.
The short video below will give you a tiny taster of some of the early interviews.
The movie team has now reached a point where they need some more resources to be able to produce the film at the quality they’d like. Through a campaign on fundraising website indigogo, they have been working toward their goal of $4000 to contribute to travel costs to get interviews in remote provinces, professional translation (from both Laos and minority languages like Hmong that are spoken in the video), and editing costs. After only 17 days of fundraising they have over $2000, and there are still 13 days left to help them out.
The goal of this film is to help stimulate much needed discussion about happiness, development and poverty alleviation, where poverty is 3-dimensional; emotional and spiritual not just economic. And there will be a great opportunity to share this film at the Asia Europe People’s Forum (AEPF) in Vientiane, Laos, this October.
If you’re intrigued by this project, and the dialogue about happiness in Laos, please contribute to this project. If you can’t donate, just share the link with other friends who might be interested, and continue to check back for updates on the project.