Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Happiness and Urban Critiques: Film Screenings at the Museum of Vancouver

If you haven’t already heard, the DOXA Film Festival is sweeping Vancouver, offering diehard film buffs the opportunity to see some of the best documentary films of the year.

If you haven’t already heard, the DOXA Film Festival is sweeping Vancouver, offering diehard film buffs the opportunity to see some of the best documentary films of the year. As part of the festival, the Museum of Vancouver will host the Canadian premiere of Bart Simpson's sublime urban documentary film, BRASILIA: Life After Design and a screening of Stefan Sagmeister and Ben Nabors' playful documentary The Happy Film.

BRASILIA: Life After Design

Part ode, part critique, Bart Simpson’s film takes the viewer on a surreal and melancholic tour of strange and monumental cityscape of Brazil’s capital. Architect Oscar Niemeyer and urban planner Lucio Costa organized Brasilia to function as a “rational city.” Decades later, it’s fascinating to see the city’s population navigating the constraints the designers imposed in their obsessive quest for order.

The screening will be followed by discussion with the film’s director Bart Simpson and architecture/urbanism critic Trevor Boddy.

BRASILIA: Life After Design (Canada/UK, 2017; 78 min.)

Monday May 8: 7:00pm

Tickets are available HERE.

The Happy Film

Can graphic designer and filmmaker Stefan Sagmeister redesign his personality to become a better person? Is it possible to train his mind to become happier? Sagmeister pursues three controlled experiments of meditation, therapy, and drugs, grading himself along the way. Watch as real life creeps in and confounds the pursuit of a better life.

Following the film, Sagmeister will be joined by clinical counselor and once ordained Buddhist monk Dr. Sean Pritchard, and UBC Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry Dr. Andrea Grabovac for a discussion of the film's pursuit of happiness and some of the pitfalls Sagmeister experiences on his journey.

The Happy Film: (2016, 95 min.)

Thursday May 11: 7:00pm

Tickets are available HERE.

The Museum of Vancouver is located at 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver, BC.