Relive some moments of happiness from our festival event ‘100 Years of Happiness’ at the Common Market Belfast hosted by Michael Condron and musical accompaniment from The Organauts.

This event was produced and created by the team at Belfast Film Festival and Docs Ireland and supported by Film Hub North with National Lottery funding on behalf of the BFI Film Audience Network.

This newly commissioned audio visual film assembled hundreds of clips of people in the north of Ireland investigating and exploring centres of pleasure, nodes of desire, knots of yearning…their capillaries flooded with gratification.

Showing the mundane to the spectacular; the town challenging, worm racing, disco dancing, pipe smoking, ribbon cutting, raffle winning breadth of approaches to attaining happiness and enlightenment. A playful and exotic, humorous and joyous, surreal and disturbing journey into the collective psyche.

A psychiatric semiologist (Michael Condron) provided insight into the collective consciousness manifested in the material. The crescendo of the film features an 8 minute version of Donna Summers “I Feel Love” played by The Organauts to an ecstatic, strobing, pulsating, array of overlapping fast moving local imagery, a sensory overload.

Footage courtesy of independent sources, Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive and BBC Northern Ireland archives. www.digitalfilmarchive.net

Photo credit @fillycampbell