Noémi Veronika Szakonyi
About
Noemi Veronika Szakonyi is a freelance film director and producer. She graduated from the documentary directing MA course at the University of Theatre and Film Arts Budapest. Since then, she has focused on documentaries and short films produced by her company Match Frame Productions. Her films have been supported by HBO Europe, Creative Europe Media, and the Hungarian Film Institute. As a director, she is working on her first feature documentary, AFTERGLOW, which received the EDP Development Award and the HBO Co-Production Award.
Noemi is a 2015 and 2019 Sundance Documentary Film Program Grantee with projects AFTERGLOW and HER MOTHERS, which is her first feature documentary as a producer and will premiere at Hot Docs 2020. She is currently based in New York City and is working on her films during a leave of absence from the Graduate Film Program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She is an active member of NYWIFT.
Gross National Happiness
Amar (40) and Gunaraj (36) are not only close friends but also “Happiness Agents”, who work together for Bhutan’s Ministry of Happiness. They travel door-to-door measuring people’s level of happiness among the remote Himalayan mountains - and in their mission, learn about people’s dreams and life goals. GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS is a satirical ‘road movie’ that takes us through a mosaic of stories exploring the real desires of a society with a specific national identity - an identity created by the Happiness Ministry of Bhutan, a country that has been closed-off for centuries.