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.

As the gap between a burning airplane and the ground gets smaller, one passenger has other things on his mind!

In a desolate world, in a city of madness, José Ditirambo is a wolf among wolves, a fury among furies, an intrepid journalist whose favorite weapons are humor and logic, until he embarks on a mission to find a woman he has heard asking for help through the pipes in his bathroom.

Danny ponders a way for rival gangs to avoid violence at an upcoming dance.

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.

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

Mrs. Anthoula, an elderly lady with hearing problems, is in danger of being evicted out of her flat. Mrs. Dafni, a social-worker, will try to help her.

Shabbat Dinner is boring as usual for William Shore. His mother has invited two crazy hippies and their son and is doing her best to show off, his father is drunk and berating their oddball guests, and he doesn't have much in common with their son Virgo. That is, until Virgo tells him that he has just come out as gay.

A day in the life of a shoe shine boy, an international economist and a sex worker. It is about women. The ones out there, or lack of. The ones inside us, or lack of. In this world of men, we are still awaiting her.