HAPPINESS - SHORT FILM
By Sophie Barthes
Color - 35 mm – 11 min
Completed may 2006
Synopsis
Log Line: What if happiness was for sale?
Synopsis: One evening, after work, Iwona buys a box of happiness in a strange
discount store and has to decide what to do with it.
A straight-faced comedy with Polish-american screen legend Elzbieta Czyzewska
shot in Boston and New York City. The New York Anthology Film Archives
dedicated a retrospective to her career in May 2005. Elzbieta has acted in more
than 40 feature films directed by Polish distinguished directors as Andrzej Wajda,
Wojciech Has, Jerzy Skolimowski and Janusz Nasfeter.
Sophie Barthes – Writer / Director
Born in France, Sophie Barthes grew up in the Middle East and South America. In
2000, she moved to New York to attend Columbia University Graduate School of
International & Public Affairs for a curriculum in international affairs and film.
Sophie graduated after directing a documentary in Yemen on the UNICEF literacy
programs for women with cinematographer Andrij Parekh. Together they directed
the short film Snowblink in Ukraine. She recently wrote and directed the awardwinning short Happiness, which screened at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Both
Happiness and Cold Souls won the NYSCA Individual Artists Grants and the
Showtime Tony Cox Award for Best Screenplay (Feature & Short categories) at the
Nantucket Film Festival. Sophie recently completed her residency at the Nantucket
Screenwriters Colony and was admitted to the 2007 Sundance Screenwriters Lab
with Cold Souls. Cold Souls will be produced by Touchy Feely Films and
Journeyman Pictures.
- “Happiness”, 35 mm, 11 min. May 2006, USA.
Played in 2006 at Nantucket IFF (won the Showtime Tony Cox Award Best Screenplay
in a Short Film), Palm Springs ShortFest (won Best Live Action Short under 15 min.),
Expresion en Corto Mexico (won 2nd prize Best Live Action Short), Los Angeles Intl
Short FF (nominated Best Female Director), Paris Cinéma Les Rencontres
Cinématographiques, Rhodes Island, Monterrey IFF Mexico, Montréal IFF, Boston IFF,
Hamptons IFF, Molodist IFF (Ukraine), LA Femme FF, Chicago IFF, Prague IFF, Sao
Paolo IFF, Izmir IFF (Turkey), Sienna IFF, Austin IFF. In 2007: San Francisco
Independent FF, Cinequest, Santa Barbara IFF, Florida FF, Portland IFF, Sofia IFF
(Bulgaria), The Space4 Shorts FF (UK), Birds Eye View
Southwest and Sundance.
FF (London), South By
- “Snowblink” 35mm, 17 min. 2004, Ukraine/USA
(Directed by Sophie Barthes & Andrij Parekh, written by Sophie Barthes)
Played at Tribeca Film festival 2005, Hampton International film festival 2005,
Stonybrook 2005, Telluride film festival 2005, Texas film festival 2005 (Best
Director Award), Denver film festival 2005, San Francisco Women Film Festival
2006 (Won best short), and various European festivals.
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Writer/ Director’s picture
Andrij Parekh – Cinematographer
Of Ukrainian and Indian descent, Andrij studied cinematography at the FAMU film
school in Prague and at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where he received his MFA
in 2001. Andrij has photographed over seventy films, music videos and
commercials. Two of these swept the top Wasserman Awards in NYU's First Run
Festival in 2001, and three others took first and second prizes the following year,
earning Andrij a special award for Outstanding Cinematography. Andrij also
photographed two Student Academy Award-winning films (Helicopter & The
Wormhole), was nominated for the 1998 Eastman Excellence in Cinematography
Award, apprenticed on The Yards (2000) with Harris Savides and is a recipient of
the 2001 & 2003 ASC Heritage Award for Cinematography. Andrij has shot seven
features: “Messengers” (Director Philip Farha), “Speak” (Director Jessica Sharzer),
which played at Sundance 2004, “The Favor” (Director Eva Aridjis), “The
Treatment” (Director Oren Rudavsky, Best feature at Tribeca Film Festival 2006),
“Sonhos de Peixe” (Director Kirill Mikhanovsky, in competition at Cannes Film
Festival Critics’ Week 2006), “Half Nelson” (Director Ryan Fleck, starring Ryan
Gossling), which played in competition at Sundance 2006 and at New Directors New
Films, and just completed principal photography of “Noise” (Director Henry Bean,
starring Tim Robbins and William Hurt). His short film “Mertvi Pivni” (Dead
Roosters) won the Grand Marnier Prize at the New York Film Festival, and the
“Future Filmmaker Award” at the Palm Springs Film Festival. He was named one of
Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film”.
Filmography Andrij Parekh as (writer/ director):
- “Dead Roosters” (Mertvi Pivni), Super-16mm, 13 min., 2002, Ukraine/USA
Played at Palm Springs Short Fest 2003 (Future Film Maker Award), New York Film
Festival 2003 (Grand Marnier Prize), Clermont Ferrand 2003, Avanca (Portugal) Film
Festival 2003 and various US and European festivals.
Composer’s Bio : Rasmus Bille Bähncke - Composer/Producer/Songwriter
Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, April 16th 1973.
Based in Manhattan, NYC since 2002. Rasmus' work is characterized mainly by a
huge diversity in styles and production techniques. As a Record Producer and
Songwriter he has produced and written for artists in most genres. His work includes
Production work for CeCe Winans’ 2006 Double Grammy winning song “Pray”,
Production and writing for Backstreet Boys “Never Gone” (2005 album) and Mixing
and Co-Production on Sting’s duet with Mary J. Blige “Whenever I Say Your Name”
(2004). Prize achievements in composing for film count the “Clive Davis Award for
Excellence in Music in Film 2004” and the “Craft Award for Excellence in Original
Music, First Run 2004” achieved for his score to Frederikke Aspock's Cannes 1st
prize winner “Happy Now”.
CREDITS
cast elzbieta czyzweska
written & directed by sophie barthes
produced by Andrij Parekh & sophie barthes
cinematographer andrij parekh
music composed by rasmus bille bähncke
editor joey grossfield
PRESS FOR HAPPINESS
-INDIEWIRE
http://www.indiewire.com/ots/2007/01/park_city_07_wi.html
PARK CITY '07 SHORTS NOTEBOOK | With a Strong Emphasis on Storytelling, Columbia
University Filmmakers Dominate the Shorts Programs at This Year's Sundance.
by Kim Adelman (January 21, 2007)
"Happiness" (Dir. Sophie Barthes, USA, 2006, 11 Min.) Barthes, who recently attended the
Sundance screenwriters' lab, exhibits remarkable writing and directing talent, constructing an
unforgettable fable about a middle-aged factory worker who discovers that happiness doesn't
necessarily come in a box.
http://www.indiewire.com/movies/2006/09/believe_the_hyp.html
Believe the Hype: Ten of the Most Buzzed-About Films from Two of Southern
California's Largest Shortfests
by Kim Adelman (September 22, 2006)
"Happiness" (Dir. Sophie Barthes, USA, 2006, 12 min.)
Sophie Barthes' quirky piece is an exploration of a "what if" scenario: what if happiness were
literally for sale? This remarkable short has an unusual setting: a condom factory, where a
disgruntled worker (played by Polish-American actress Elzbieta Czyzewska) spends her days
testing the product for leaks. "Happiness" won the Best Live-Action Under 15 Minutes jury
prize at Palm Springs.
http://www.thedailyreel.com/news-opinion/reel-focus/come-on-get-happiness
COME ON, GET HAPPINESS
By Matthew Ross, January 24, 2007
Thanks to the Sundance website, I streamed about ten of the festival's short-form selections
online this afternoon. And Sophie Barthes' Happiness was by far the most intriguing and original
film of the bunch. Starring Polish actress Elzbieta Czyzewska (once the muse of Polish autuer
Andrzej Wajda), Happiness is a playful fable about a lonely woman on the cusp of old age who
works in a condom factory. As a repireve from her humdrum existence, she buys a box marked
"happiness" at a local store. What's inside? Does it matter? Either way, this short is definitely
worth checking out. (Kim Adelman at indieWIRE just gave it a rave in her shorts round-up and
the Reeler just did a profile of Barthes for his Sundance coverage.) It can be streamed here on the
Sundance Web site or purchased for download via the iTunes Music Store.
http://www.veryshortlist.com/lists/pick.cfm?email_key=331d030e-44cf-4b69-b7a9-66b86ea1cd63
Sundance for free - JANUARY 19, 2007
You don’t have to brave the hype and cold of Sundance to spot the next generation of
cinematic talent. The festival’s organizers have mounted a virtual film festival of
unprecedented scope, with 46 dramatic, documentary, and animated short films that you
can watch online free of charge. The first batch got posted late yesterday (more will be
added every day through January 21), including Sophie Barthes’s Happiness — not to be
confused with the current Will Smith feature — which is about a spinster who visits a
shop near her New York home and buys a mysterious sealed box that’s simply labeled
HAPPINESS. It’s a beautifully shot film with precious little dialogue. And since it’s only
11 minutes long, we won’t say anything more about it other than that it’s sort of the anti–
Sex and the City and that it captures the hopeful hollowness of contemporary consumer
culture with the sweet, sad precision of Lost in Translation.
New York Magazine
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2007/01/how_to_check_out_sundance_with.html
How to Check Out Sundance Without Leaving Your Chair
But are the shorts worth watching? Many are terrible (avoid Der Ostwind, The Grass
Grows Green, Bobby Bird: the Devil in Denim, and God Provides), but the best are —
unsurprisingly — by New York directors: Alex Weil's computer-animated One Rat Short is
a beautifully animated CGI calling card about a Manhattan rat who (literally) falls for a
lab rat while chasing a bag of Cheetos. In Sophie Barthes's melancholic Happiness, a
depressive woman buys a box of "happiness" at a weird little discount store near Coney
Island and can't decide whether to open it.
- CHICAGO SUNDAY TIMES
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/movies/88747,CST-FTR-film09.article
A bit more upbeat is the 11-minute "Happiness," Sophie Barthes' observant drama about a
condom-tester who's tempted by a product promising happiness itself.
- FIPRESCI
http://www.fipresci.org/festivals/archive/2006/montreal/montreal_short_films.htm
Montreal 2006
Short Cuts By Kirill R azlogov
Happiness is the title of a short film made in the USA by Sophie Barthes, a French film maker
with Middle Eastern and South American experience. The East of Europe in the film is
represented by Elzbieta Czyzewska – a former Polish film star, ageing in New York. “Happiness”
is a small box, bought in a discount store. Instead of opening it, the heroine gives it back and buys
a pair of shoes with high heels – a more sure way to achieve happiness and impress colleagues at
the factory. Small pleasures of life are more harmless than illicit love.[…] A whole world
evolves, is reflected and artistically transformed in a small selection of short films by more or less
young filmmakers with contemporary global personal experiences. It is more than we can say
about most feature films.
Kirill Razlogov
© FIPRESCI 2006
http://m-dee.blogspot.com/2007/01/is-warm-gun.html
One of my favorite short films in a while is Sophie Barthes' Happiness. The New York director has only
made a couple shorts and they've all won ridiculous amounts of awards--with good reason. Blank Screen
(which is in the last stages of construction, please be patient, France) is interviewing her.
www.polishculture-nyc.org/elzbieta_czyzewska.htm
Elzbieta Czyzewska: the Actor as a Rebel
By Joanna R. Clark
Before her graduation from Warsaw's venerable State Academy of Theatre, Elzbieta Czyzewska
was advised by the Dean that in order to play leading roles in Romantic repertory she should
undergo plastic surgery: to reduce the size of her breasts. Her answer, after she consulted her
colleagues in the notoriously anti-establishment Student Satirical Theatre, was a brave: No way.
Ten years later - at the peak of her extraordinary film and theater career, and in deep trouble with
the communist regime on account of her marriage to New York Times correspondent, David
Halberstam - she was cast by Andrzej Wajda in his movie, Everything for Sale. Wajda had this to
say on why he chose Czyzewska: "Once, at a large fashionable Warsaw party, I saw Elzbieta
doing a wild solo dance that seemed to be aimed against every one of those bigwigs there, and I
thought I wanted her to recreate this dance in my film. And so she did, and it achieved its
purpose."
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
But before the real dramas in her life, there were the comedies which -- along with regular
appearances in live television theater -- launched Czyzewska as an enormously popular star.
The young directors of the Polish new wave in cinema recognized in this classically-trained
fireball of spontaneity their peer in breaking the conventions of superficial romantic comedy.
In A Bride for the Australian (1963), Where is the General (1963) and Giuseppe in Warsaw
(1964), Elzbieta Czyzewska created a character who was almost the reverse of the Cinderella
versus Prince Charming formula, as it was her charm and wit that turned her somewhat
hapless suitors into, perhaps, her manly equals. Not a "method" actor, she would never
disappear into a character, nor would she, on the other hand, allow her striking persona to
wholly define her succession of screen and theatre parts. This partly Brechtian, partly
instinctive, approach contributed (together with Wojciech Has's masterly direction) to her
triumph in The Saragossa Manuscript (1964), in which the flaming eroticism of the
Andalusian Frasquita is ever so slightly reined in by Czyzewska's whimsical sense of humor.
After TV-theater roles that won her the major Golden Mask Award, Czyzewska had her most
significant stage success in the Teatr Dramatyczny's 1965 production of Arthur Miller's After
the Fall. One reviewer wrote of her performance that it informed the central character with
more nuance and masked complexity than was provided by the play's text. By now
internationally recognized (from Moscow to San Salvador) as one of Poland's top young
actors (along with Zbigniew Cybulski and Daniel Olbrychski), she expanded her artistic
range in two film dramas: Unloved (1965, directed by Janusz Nasfeter) and Andrzej Wajda's
Everything for Sale (1968). The dark mood of both these movies marked the country's
disillusionment after a brief period of cultural "thaw". Unloved, set shortly before the
outbreak of WW2, tells the story of a young Jewish woman's love affair whose ending
coincides with the ominous atmosphere of the period, including its anti-Semitism.
Czyzewska's Naomi, as the film's few reviewers raved (it was allowed a very limited run),
was powerful and heartbreaking.
But it would be Everything for Sale, a personal commentary on the lives of the film creators,
the director and the players, that secured for her a place in the motion pictures' hall of fame.
Here, like everyone in the cast, she plays herself in a struggle to oppose the director's
deliberate manipulation of the actors, to maintain the distinction between life and art, until
this effort collapses in the suicide scene. "Who in the moment of Ela's suicide attempt did not
forget that this was about the making of a movie, and instead took it for the real stuff?" wrote Marcel Martin, in Cinema 71. Already renowned, Elzbieta Czyzewska became a
legend.
She also became an outcast, and soon an exile. A thorn in the communist regime's side was
her marriage to David Halberstam, who was expelled from Poland for his sharp criticisms of
the regime at the time. Czyzewska's career was disrupted, and when she returned in 1968 at
Wajda's invitation to play in his film, Everything for Sale, production was complicated by the
March outbreak of student protests and the start of that year's anti-Semitic expulsions.
Ironically, Czyzewska herself was expelled, and partly because she promptly accepted a role
in exiled director Aleksander Ford's adaptation of Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, she was
unable to work in Poland until 1980, when communist control had briefly loosened up with
the rise of Solidarity.
Elzbieta Czyzewska has continued to do theater work in the United States, winning an Obie
Award in 1990 for her role in Crowbar by Mac Wellman. Her American premieres also
include Wellman's Cleveland, Strange Feet, Cellophane, and the Lesser Magoo, as well as
Janusz Glowacki's Hunting Cockroaches. She performed in Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken,
directed by Robert Wilson at American Repertory Theater and in several productions at Yale
Repertory Theater, including productions of Dostoyevsky's The Possessed and Rozewicz's
The White Marriage, both directed by Andrzej Wajda, as well as Pentecost by David Edgar,
Strindberg's The Father, and Chekov's Ivanov. She also played in Big Potato, by Arthur
Laurents, at the Doris Duke Theater. And she starred in the Polish premiere of John Guare's
Six Degrees of Separation at the Teatr Dramatyczny in Warsaw.
Her American films include The Music Box, directed by Costa Gavras; Running on Empty,
directed by Sidney Lumet; and Putney Swope, directed by Robert Downey. Her television
appearances include the American Playhouse drama Misplaced, on PBS. Her most recent
theater roles were in Martha Clarke's Vienna Lusthaus, and in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler at the
New Theatre Workshop in 2004. Finally, there hasn't been an evening of Polish poetry in
New York and several other American cities at which Czyzewska hasn't been a mesmerizing
interpreter for both Polish and American audiences of Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska,
and Adam Zagajewski.
Contact
Sophie Barthes
69 East 7th St. #4A
NY, NY 10003
sophiebarthes@gmail.com
917.679.7971
Representation: Craig Kestel – William Morris Agency