Fifty years ago people on the streets of Paris were asked; Are you happy? in a documentary experiment with the new film technology of 1960 – hand-held sync sound.  Searching for Happiness takes advantage of a new era of creative technology to ask the same question today. From Mongolia to Maharashtra, filmmakers around the world have responded to an invitation to restage those 1960 interviews. In a documentary first, producer Mandy Rose has brought those recordings together with live feeds from the web to create a documentary experience which never plays the same way twice. Searching for Happiness is a meditation on culture, values and the meaning of life.

As part of this year's Bristol Festival of Ideas, Studio resident Mandy Rose will present a live demo of the project, and will be in conversation with Executive Producer Jon Dovey.  

Mandy Rose is a Senior Research Fellow at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England. Her work as a documentary maker includes Hilda at Darjeeling for Channel Four and Meeting the Masai Mob for BBC2. She was co-founder and producer of BBC 2’s Video Nation project and executive producer of the digital storytelling project, Capture Wales. Mandy blogs at CollabDocs and is a contributing editor to i-Docs

Jon Dovey is Director of the AHRC funded Research & Enterprise in Arts & Creative Technologies (REACT) Knowledge Exchange hub and Professor of Screen Media at the Digital Cultures Research Centre

For more information and to buy tickets visit http://wshd.to/happy