The Economics of Happiness | |
---|---|
Directed by | Steven Gorelick Helena Norberg-Hodge John Page |
Produced by | Helena Norberg-Hodge |
Narrated by | John Page |
Edited by | Anna Fricke Army Armstrong Meredith Holch |
Music by | Florian Fricke |
Release date |
|
Running time | 68 minutes |
Country | Australia |
Language | English |
The Economics of Happiness is a 2011 documentary film directed by Helena Norberg-Hodge, Steven Gorelick, and John Page, and produced by Local Futures (formerly the International Society for Ecology and Culture).
The film features many voices from six continents calling for systemic economic change. The documentary describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. While government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power, people around the world are resisting those policies and working to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm: an economics of localization.
The Economics of Happiness has won "Best in Show" at the Cinema Verde Film and Arts Festival, "Best Direction" from EKOFilm 2011 (Czech Republic), "Judges' Choice" and "Audience Choice" at the Auroville International Film Festival (India), an "Award of Merit" from the Accolade Film Festival, and several other awards. [2]
In 2012, the film was listed among the top ten films as chosen by Transition town initiatives. [3]
In 2015, it was awarded 1st place out of 100 "documentaries we can use to change the world" by Films for Action, an activism-oriented film screening and compilation site. [4]
The Toronto International Film Festival is one of the most prestigious and largest publicly attended film festivals in the world, founded in 1976 and taking place each September. It is also a permanent destination for film culture operating out of the TIFF Lightbox cultural centre, located in Downtown Toronto.
Johan Norberg is a Swedish author and historian of ideas, devoted to promoting economic globalization and what he describes as classical liberal positions. He is the author of In Defense of Global Capitalism (2001), Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (2016), and The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World (2023). Since 15 March 2007, he has been a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and since January 2017 an executive editor at Free To Choose Media, where he regularly produces documentaries for US public television.
Mina Shum is an independent Canadian filmmaker. She is a writer and director of award-winning feature films, numerous shorts and has created site specific installations and theatre. Her features, Double Happiness and Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity both premiered in the US at the Sundance Film Festival and Double Happiness won the Wolfgang Staudte Prize for Best First Feature at the Berlin Film Festival and the Audience Award at Torino. She was director resident at the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto. She was also a member of an alternative rock band called Playdoh Republic.
Local Futures is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to raise awareness about what it identifies as the root causes of contemporary social, environmental, and economic crises.
Helena Norberg-Hodge is founder and director of Local Futures, previously known as the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC). Local Futures is a non-profit organization "dedicated to the revitalization of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide."
Sheffield DocFest is an international documentary festival and industry marketplace held annually in Sheffield, England.
Göteborg Film Festival (GFF), formerly Göteborg International Film Festival (GIFF), known in English as the Gothenburg Film Festival, formerly Gothenburg International Film Festival, is an annual film festival in Gothenburg, Sweden and the largest film event in Scandinavia. When it was launched on February 8, 1979, it showed 17 films on 3 screens and had 3,000 visitors.
Lauren Greenfield is an American artist, documentary photographer, and documentary filmmaker. She has published four photographic monographs, directed four documentary features, a documentary series, produced four traveling exhibitions, and published in magazines throughout the world.
Sturla Gunnarsson is an Icelandic-Canadian film and television director and producer.
The Tokyo Anime Awards started in 2002, but was named in 2005. The first, second and third award ceremonies were simply named 'Competition'. The award ceremonies were held at the Tokyo International Anime Fair (TAF) until 2013. In 2014, after the merger of the Tokyo International Anime Fair with the Anime Contents Expo and the formation of the AnimeJapan convention, the Tokyo Anime Awards was changed into a separate festival called Tokyo Anime Awards Festival (TAAF).
Jon Reiss is a film producer and director, and an author. He has made the feature film Cleopatra's Second Husband (1998) and the documentaries Better Living Through Circuitry (1999) and Bomb It (2007). He has directed music videos for artists, including Nine Inch Nails, Slayer, Danzig, and the Black Crowes.
Nila Madhab Panda is an Indian film producer and director. Panda has directed and produced over 70 films, documentaries, and shorts based on social issues, such as climate change, child labor, education, water issues, sanitation and other developmental issues in India. Many of his films are based on his own experiences. He has won several awards and received critical acclaim for his films which have been described as "entertaining yet socially relevant."
Daniel Fridell is a Swedish film director and producer.
Suman Ghosh is a film director, and a professor of economics at Florida Atlantic University.
The Square is a 2013 Egyptian-American documentary film by Jehane Noujaim, which depicts the Egyptian Crisis until 2013, starting with the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 at Tahrir Square. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 86th Academy Awards. It also won three Emmy Awards at the 66th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards, out of four for which it was nominated.
Voices of Transition is a 2012 documentary film by film director and producer Nils Aguilar. The film was produced in France and Germany and examines the danger posed to agricultural production by energy and resource scarcity. It depicts organic agricultural alternatives in France, the Transition Towns movement and urbanised food production in Cuba as forerunners of the transformation of food production away from industrialised agriculture and towards small-scale, decentralised production methods. The German cinema debut was held on 2 May 2013 as part of a wider German cinema tour, followed or preceded by theatrical releases and tours in Italy[34], USA[35], Portugal[36] Wallonia[5] and Flanders[6] (Belgium), Great Britain[7], Argentina and Chile.[9]
Faces Places is a 2017 French documentary film directed by Agnès Varda and JR. It follows the pair as they travel around rural France creating portraits of the people they meet. The film was screened out of competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the L'Œil d'or award, and released on 28 June 2017 in France, and on 6 October 2017 in the United States. At the 90th Academy Awards, the film was nominated for Best Documentary Feature.
The Toronto International Film Festival People's Choice Award is an annual film award, presented by the Toronto International Film Festival to the movie rated as the year's best film according to TIFF audience. Past sponsors of the award have included Cadillac and Grolsch.
The Biggest Little Farm is a 2018 American documentary film, directed by John Chester. The film profiles the life of John Chester and his wife Molly as they acquire and establish themselves on Apricot Lane Farms in Moorpark, California.
2040 is a 2019 Australian documentary film directed by and starring Damon Gameau. The film looks at the effects of climate change over the next 20 years and what technologies that exist today can reverse the effects.