WHAT REALLY MAKES US HAPPY

The word happiness is often associated with concepts like freedom and home. "What really makes us happy" demonstrates this through three interconnected chapters in which people tell their stories, authentically, freely, and without any stage direction. There's the nun in a convent, the writer who, despite being heavily in debt, fought his way to becoming a successful best-selling author, a man who lives in the forest without electricity or running water for over 30 years, the postman who goes to the Zugspitze every day for 30 years, a woman who studies happiness, and a female artist from Ukraine who has been searching for a new identity in Germany. The central object is a red folding cinema chair, on which the protagonists sit. Embedded within this: the story of Sven, a homeless man from Cologne who lives in a self-made bicycle trailer and then receives a key to an apartment from a social services agency for a supposedly better life. At the end of the film we see his burned-out trailer, from which he fishes out undamaged spare parts to create something new.