The Happy Life

The film threads together four stories, taking us into the life of a stressed-out Mohawk stockbroker in Manhattan; a young Inupiat girl sent to live with her grandmother in Barrow, Alaska; a Navajo gang member who must find his core values in his reservation on the mesas of New Mexico; and a Quechua healer in Peru, attempting to save a sick child. Each story explores what it means to belong to a specific community. A Thousand Roads is a fictional work, produced by National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) to explore the human context of the NMAI’s collections. The film is striking visually, and presents through its beauty and its stories an imaginative entry into knowing about Native people living in the vast indigenous geography that comprises the Americas. Rather than presenting a conventional historical perspective, the film is composed of short contemporary fictions about individuals, grounding them in emotional truths to which an audience can easily relate.

When Tom travels across the country to locate the Daughter he never knew, undeniable questions of consequence rise to the surface when he offers a ride to stranded young woman.

Short tourist film set on a tropical island where a sailor falls in love with a native girl.

A group of middle-class friends driving around São Paulo choose one of the women as a bait to attract a victim, object of their alienation and moral aggressiveness.

A greedy King Midas is visited one day by a mysterious visitor who grants him the ability to turn all things he touches to gold. He learns his lesson when the food he tries to eat and his own daughter are turned to gold as well. The visitor reappears and offers him the opportunity to return to his old self, which he gladly does. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2004.

A husband and father starts to dig a hole in his backyard, for no apparent reason.

In "Falling. Desert. Syn" there is the body of repetition—not of tautology but of smooth resurrection; a body dying and being resurrected in a dance without suffering. A body of the desert, which is not deserted, but instead possessed by a force of attraction towards the sky, a force as strong as the one towards the earth. A body for the stars, the same one which plunges into the underworlds.

Saved from shipwreck, a little girl is taken into the protection of the North-African tribal chief and named "Zohra".

A haunting short version of Edgar Allan Poe's famous story about a cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on a victim of the Spanish Inquisition...

It depicts apocalypse concentrating on the last days of a family's catastrophic life in a prevalent winter (nuclear winter) in Iran in 2012. The notions of void and terror are dominant in the film. (The nuclear catastrophe or winter is not specifically mentioned in the short film because of the hard political situation in Iran. However, its implications exist throughout the film like their imprisonment in their claustrophobic place.) Basically, the figures are indifferent in their hard circumstances and are not able to communicate with each other.

This 1914 drama set in the WWI-era relates a heroic act carried out by a war nurse for the Red Cross (Dora Tschitorina) who has witnessed the death of her husband (Ivan Mosjoukine).

A man with arachnophobia buys a poisonous bird spider and sets it free in his apartment.

In a cave an ancient and mysterious rite is about to be performed. Seven girls will be sacrificed to grant another life to the thousand-years-old alchemist Felix. Only the off-duty cop Paul and a deaf-mute teenager Lara could save them from that tragic fate.

In the near future,the world has suffered a terrible destruction. Through the wreckage, a man tries to survive and fulfill his basic needs.

A doctor mysteriously discovers that he is required urgently at the village to offer his services. He arrives there after a long and difficult journey, only to discover that the village is empty.

Journey to the future of Rani and Keren, a young couple moving in together for the first time. Without control they are drawn to the race of marriage, children and work, while desperately trying to keep up with the race and stay together.

A short story of two strangers meeting in a train journey, not knowing that something stranger is coming their way.

Soon a man will find out that his destiny is already written and that he can't do anything to change it.

The old lighthouse keeper lives peacefully with his two daughters, who are both engaged to fisherman. One night he receives a message announcing the shipwreck...

Mairy, a thirty-year-old woman from Philippines, works in a village in Cyprus. She takes care of Mr. Michalis, an eigthy-five-year-old man with arteriosclerosis. Mr. Michalis spends his days in front of the television, watching time and again a soap opera with a heroine named Anna. He soon becomes obsessed with this heroine, to the point of calling Mairy 'Anna', despite the remarks of his daughter Melpo. When Mairy finds some old photographs she makes an important discovery...