The Happiness Effect

‘Moscou’ is a densely populated working class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Ghent, Belgium. Matty, mother of three, bumps her car into a truck on the parking lot of a supermarket. Johnny climbs down from the cabin. He is infuriated by the dent in his front bumper and yells at Matty. Although impressed by the accident, Matty fights back with sharp words. Their discussion turns into a row, and the police have to intervene. Matty goes home, the trunk of her car dancing up and down. Back in her apartment, Matty takes a hot bath to recover from the afternoon’s emotionswhen the phone rings. It’s Johnny, apologizing for his behaviour on the parking lot. Matty tells him to stay out of her life. A dramatic comedy begins about a woman whose soul is full of dents and bruises.

Living together in a workers' dorm, Katerina and her friends are determined to make it in Moscow. But when a boorish cameraman forces himself on her, Katerina finds herself pregnant and alone as her friends move on. Twenty years later, Katerina is a factory director, outpacing her old roommates career-wise, yet still alone but for her daughter. Love seems possible again when she meets a genial mechanic.

A young girl comes to an embittered town and confronts its attitude with her determination to see the best in life.

Peasant children Mytyl and Tyltyl are led on a magical quest for the fabulous Blue Bird of Happiness by the fairy Berylune. On their journey, they're accompanied by the anthropomorphized presences of a Dog, a Cat, Light, Fire, and Bread, among other entities.

To stop Pinkie's widowed, struggling mother Dottie from marrying a well-off older man they know she doesn't love, teenager Pinkie and her best friend Buzz kidnap her in the family travel trailer to live a carefree life on the open road. They then get the idea to find Dottie a financially secure husband whom both she and Pinkie would like.

A New York couple and their Midwestern friends find that drastic changes have occurred in their respective lives since they last met.

Faced with ever-growing obstacles, we force ourselves to compartmentalise and persevere; "We Move". What is the collateral damage of always having to put on a brave face?

The night of November 13, 2015 changes everything for Antoine. Hélène, his wife and mother of his young son, dies during the terrorist attacks at the Bataclan club in Paris. In a moving Facebook post, he counters the assassins' hatred with the love for his son – a message, that moves people worldwide.

An under-appreciated father, living a humdrum middle-class life, is unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight—and soon he is regarded as never before.

The Racket Boys is a modern comedy about two men and a woman driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco for individual reasons, but the same goal -- finding happiness and a reason for it all. A simple story of friends on the road, searching for meaning in an indifferent existence

The film tells the story of Eva, a pianist who followed her husband, musician and composer Peter, to a small village on the Slovak-Hungarian border. While Peter enjoys the peace and quiet of composing in the local environment, Eva searches in vain for a career as a performer, feeling disconnected not only from her family but also from her familiar Prague surroundings and friends. Unfaithful Plays is an intimate love drama about love, infidelity, human failures and finding oneself.

The year is 1987 and Japan is just reaching the peak of its economic success. Eighteen-year old Yonosuke Yokomichi arrives in Tokyo from Nagasaki. Ordinary in every way possible, he lives in a suburb far from the excitement of the big city and commutes to a university in the center of Tokyo.

A charming yet mischievous man who navigates his community by scamming people and borrowing money. Despite his deceitful ways, Mabidi tries to maintain a semblance of normalcy at home, where he faces his no-nonsense wife, Maria.

Sergio driving a taxi in a white Naples overflowing sadness and garbage. Pouring rain leads her clients through the city trying to process the death of his brother, who started ten years earlier for Tibet and never returned. A pop singer, a recycler of fragments of life, a radio announcer, an old uncle, alternate seats on its bearing, each in its own way, a trace of his brother loved. Stubborn not to go over and get lost in an endless race, Sergio is overwhelmed by memories and the music produced in pairs with Alfredo, which in Buddhism and in its foundations had found the strength to cope with the disease. Those notes that he believed buried and laid to always return overbearing and demanding a soundboard that resonate and express his being sound. Putting his hand on the piano, Sergio Alfredo feel again, giving the past with the present and realizing itself in the feeling.

In Letter to the King we meet a group of refugees, all with their own agendas, on an excursion to Oslo. A young man about to be deported visits his former employers to collect his off-the-books salary, a martial arts expert is looking for work, a young woman is haunted by the past and out for vengeance and an old man named Mirza is busy writing a letter to the king to get his final wish granted. An altogether urgent and nuanced portrait of a motley group of individuals, too often regarded as a homogeneous group.

Hector is a quirky psychiatrist who has become increasingly tired of his humdrum life. As he tells his girlfriend, Clara, he feels like a fraud: he hasn’t really tasted life, and yet he’s offering advice to patients who are just not getting any happier. So Hector decides to break out of his deluded and routine driven life. Armed with buckets of courage and child-like curiosity, he embarks on a global quest in hopes of uncovering the elusive secret formula for true happiness. And so begins a larger than life adventure with riotously funny results.