Guest
Deep in the Ukrainian countryside, the filmmaker becomes a participant of a radical group trying to discover happiness through mathematical formulas. Can they succeed, or do dreams of utopia turn into a veritable nightmare? Director Statement: When people watch “The Theory of Happiness” for the first time, they are astonished at the overwhelming, claustrophobic interior spaces of the sect, adorned by layers of political slogans on the walls and ceilings. Consider the thought that having control over an image is a political act. In this light, we must ask what this act means, and whether PORTOS has power over their images, or are overpowered by them. To understand the ideology of the sect, we must first understand their aesthetic. I have made a film, which in light of these remarks, I also hope will be understood as a political film. Its aesthetic, highlights the clashing dialogue with the sect, which is a deeply personal negotiation with participants about the limits of our mutual comfort. How can we approach interlocutors with empathy, when our aspirations, dreams and life philosophies are fundamentally contradictory? Acknowledging this paradox, I explore the relations of power of image production through the inverted gaze of the camera lens. The film finds no easy answers to the complex scenario that unfolds. But it does allow to make a number of interpretations about the power of images: why, for example, do sect members choose to borrow the symbols of the former Soviet Union, as if to recreate the fantasy of socialist utopia on a small scale? Does the sensory overload contribute to the way new participants to the sect undergo psychological conditioning? In the early 1990s, it was common for people trying to make sense of the collapse of the Soviet Union to send pages and pages of their diaries to newspapers in the hope of getting them published. Should we consider the sect’s graphomaniacal tendencies as a coping mechanism for dealing with an already-complicated, overly- dense and fragile world?
