Happiness

Sergey Dvortsevoy makes his international debut with an intimate portrait of a nomadic family living on the Kazakh plains. The slow, elegant film includes several scenes that reveal a dry sense of humor, such as a child eating the last of a bowl of yogurt and then crying, a cow getting its head stuck in a pail, and a woman singing to herself while her husband snores. Other scenes depict the harsh realities of the nomads' lives, including drunken herdsmen experiencing existential despair, growling dogs, and a camel undergoing a grim septum piercing. By the end of the film, the family moves and herds their animals—camels, cattle, goats, dogs, and horses—to a more fertile plain. The film was screened at the 1999 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.