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Community Corner

First Friday Films: The Happy Movie (2010 documentary)

The Happy Movie came about when a 2005 New York Times article listed the US as the 23rd happiest country in the world. After Hollywood producer Tom Shaydac (Liar Liar, Patch Adams, Bruce Almighty) read the article, he showed it to Academy Award nominated filmmaker Roko Belic and asked him to make a documentary about happiness.  It combines powerful human stories from around the world with cutting edge science to give us a deeper understanding of our most valued emotion.

The film explores happiness from the heights of the ivory towers at the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin and California (Riverside) to the Bushmen in Namibia's Kalahari Desert in Africa. It takes us on a kind of cultural travelogue on the happiness trail through 14 countries. We see Michael Pritchard give a class on cultivating emotional intelligence to some American middle-school kids. The game changer was when he asked the kids to speak up about how it felt to be bullied; the journey from separateness to connectedness became a reality.

One of the psychologists in the film said, "The professor said to me, 'You could never measure happiness.' Now why they thought you could measure depression which they were all doing, but you couldn't measure happiness, I'm not sure." Regarding material happiness, research showed that once someone in the US earns $50,000 a year, amounts above that make little difference in happiness. Paradoxically, Japan has both the happiest and unhappiest people on the planet. Come see the film to find out why.

Run time 73 minutes; English; not rated. Join us for popcorn during and discussion after. See http://www.peacejourney.org/  and  http://www.thehappymovie.com/film/.

Download the movie

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