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.

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 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.

Marios invites his children to the village to celebrate his fifty-three years. It seems filled but his happiness is more fragile than it seems ...

A story about love, hate and loneliness, depicting several days from the life of two brothers. They work as track walkers on a railway somewhere in rural Russia.

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

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

Alone in his kitchen in Bucharest, Dorel prepares for what seems to be a party. Actually, it’s his son’s wedding which takes place in the United States. Dorel is going to watch the wedding through a webcam, together with two of his son’s friends. On a small screen, they are about to meet the bride and her father, and witness the ceremony.

In the prosperous and chic apartment of the Christiansson family there are odd things going on. While Niclas is in the kitchen preparing dinner, in the bathroom an adultery is being committed through new technologies. Maja is exchanging kinky messages on her mobile phone from the bathtub while her husband and daughter are impatiently waiting for her to have a family dinner. Even when her phone is out of battery, she cannot bring herself to stop.

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.