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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Manuel meets Lydie, a mysterious and very attractive young woman. In the company of his friend Sizo, he drives to her remote village, but along the way they will meet very strange people and eventually face life changing events.

A film set in Falkland Islands.

This film tells the story of the president of a fictitious African nation who spends a sleepless night playing checkers with a pot-smoking vagabond who claims to be the all-round champion. However, the rules of the game entail the opponents howling vulgar and foul obscenities at one another. The champion proceeds to insult, and trounce, the President. His reward, and his fate, will not surprise anyone.

A hard story about two comrades who share a lot of bad memories, a lot of bad conscience and mountains and mountains of cigarettes.

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