HAPPINESS

Happiness is an extraordinary and surprising film of rare strangeness, which only became known in Europe in the 1970s. The film tells the story of Khmyr, a clumsy peasant in search of economic and social fulfilment. Victim of a landowner and the pre-revolutionary military and religious authorities, he finds happiness under the communist regime, working in a kolkhoz. This didactic fable was made during a period of great economic and social effort when Stalin was desperate to rationalise the disastrous Soviet agriculture. Medvedkin drew inspiration for his main character directly from the Russian peasants he met on his ‘cine-train’ journeys, a unique educational experiment aimed at spreading the principles of communism in the countryside. Originally a propaganda film, Happiness was censored by the government after its first screening. It did not reach Western Europe until the late 1960s and, fortunately, as a bottle thrown into the sea by some passionate anonymous person, in a shipment to foreign cinematheques among other films, without any etichette, in the hope that someone would do something with it. To modern viewers, this film is a rare poetic and visually powerful piece of work.