A fantastic performance by the lead actress.

This compelling doc follows a government employee tasked with conducting "happiness scale" surveys with his compatriots in Bhutan. Curated interviews and score summaries of multiple participants show the diversity of lived experiences - from a man with three wives who is 10 on the happy scale, to the very different experiences of each of his three wives, to the challenges of the Agent of Happiness himself.

In 2004, I wrote a profile for Asians in America about the man who depicted Dith Pran in the Oscar-winning The Killing Fields. I said then that Ngor's story was just as powerful and important as Pran's. It was researching Ngor's life story that got me interested in learning more about the Cambodian genocide, and what compelled me to visit Tuol Sleng and the Fields in 2007 as part of a spiritual reckoning. When one is confronted with the evidence of pure evil, one cannot stay unchanged. I've essentially been waiting for this documentary for over a decade. I wept through it. It. was. so. good.

In Alzheimer’s and dementia, the subject will never get “better.” So how does a filmmaker tell a story that is guaranteed to be absent of hope? Tell it about devotion. Devastating.