Are You Happy? New Film Follows a Bhutan Bureaucrat Who Asks 148 Questions To Find Out

Amber Kumar Gurung could be happier. Five points happier, to be precise.

Gurung lives in Bhutan, the small, predominantly Buddhist country with an explicit, constitutionally-mandated goal of increasing gross national happiness. His job is to help the country, often hailed as the happiest place on Earth, boil down the happiness of its population to a single number. Agent of Happiness, a new documentary film that debuted at Sundance in January, follows Gurung around Bhutan as he asks all sorts of people 148 different questions designed to get at one fundamental question — are you happy?

Some of the questions are direct. In the film, Gurung asks a young woman on her farm: “How happy and satisfied are you with your life, on a scale from 1 to 10?”

She responds with an emphatic “10,” since her cow (named “Lemo”) gave birth the day before. “We now have a cow for milking too. I can sell the milk, my life will become easier,” she said. “I was extremely happy.”