Like many activists in Amsterdam, the protagonist cannot sleep. Is it the blue light of sixteen hours of screen time that is really keeping him awake, or something else? Night after night, he is confronted with an endless stream of images of brutality and violence in Palestine, Congo, Kurdistan, Sudan, and Lebanon; and images of protesters in Amsterdam being violently repressed by police as they demonstrate against that very violence. Faced with a world that one cannot and should not look away from, how can one sleep?

Structured around something between a diary and a sleep journal, Happiness takes the form of a desktop documentary that follows the protagonist’s attempts to find rest. Yet, the very remedies he turns to, are often connected and complicit in the very systemic violence that prevents the protagonist from sleeping. In a state of perpetual exhaustion, the protagonist points to the suffocating presence of systemic violence and its embeddedness in everything, asking how one can find sleep or happiness under an assault from all sides.

LA