VERDICT: Firat Yucel’s desktop documentary is an impressive attempt to convey the helplessness and emotional overwhelm felt in the contemporary, hyper-connected world.
In the opening title screen of happiness, the protagonist reveals they can’t sleep.
This protagonist is a fictional being, crafted by filmmaker Firat Yucel and represented on screen in the form of a desktop diary. Their story is told through a selection of non-fiction footage combined with an ongoing text journal that mines a prevalent contemporary concern. This is the plight of the perpetually online individual, appalled by the injustices of the world and how readily they are available 24/7 at their fingertips, so mired in the doomscrolling and overawed by the torrent that they are paralysed by the constant emotional toil.
Such subject matter is not new territory for the purveyors of desktop cinema, this mode is one in which the screen replicates or directly shows the desktop of the filmmaker or an unseen user and we experience their use of the technology via which we see various videos and web searches. There is typically a clear – and at the least, underlying – engagement with how we consume information and media in the modern world inherent in such films. In Yucel’s case what he excels at is conveying the psychological impact of these experiences.
Videos pass by like flickers, juxtaposing amateur recordings of killings and bombings with produced media. All the while, the protagonist wrestles with the advice their being given about how to sleep better – like their living in a world in which the external anxieties brought on by social media accounts of genocide pales into insignificance compared to the blue light of a smartphone screen. It manages to be both humorous and damning, a poignant look at overpowering nature of consuming injustice through social media and the exhausting toll it can take with a little smidgen of hope at the potential power of real world activism in combating the malaise.
Director, editing, cinematography: Firat Yucel Screenplay: Firat Yucel, Aylin Kuryel
Sound: Metin Bozkurt Production company: Image Acts (Turkey)
Venue: International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (Best of Fests) In English, Turkish, Dutch, Serbian Arabic 18 minutes
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