Chen Chieh-jen - Happiness Building I

Date|2012.09.29 - 12.31

In 1984 the government of Taiwan announced the full-scale implementation of neoliberal economic policies. Over the following twenty-odd years, a series of related laws were passed through the “democratic” process of the representative system.

These laws not only indirectly shattered countless families, but also passed a sentence on their futures of the generation of Taiwanese born in the 1980s, affecting their labor rights, housing rights and other basic rights of subsistence. Before they had received any right to vote or had been informed of the content of these laws, they all found themselves living lives of uncertainty, lacking basic protection and being forced into a state of long-term anxiety.

Before filming Happiness Building I, Chen Chieh-jen first invited young friends of different identities and backgrounds, but all without fixed employment, to write short reflections, either as poems or essays, about their individual life histories. Afterward, he strung these examples together in a fictional narrative form, conveying the predicament of the atomized individual in the contemporary age.

The film is set in an old apartment building, which is soon to be demolished and replaced with a new structure. The tenants who live there get ready to leave one by one – an unemployed man; a young women who have no family; a lesbian whose father committed suicide after being long out of work; a woman sound artist who left home after her parents divorced. And outside the building, others appear: a single woman exhausted from protesting laws about dispatch businesses for a long time; a woman laborer who works at a computer recycling center; a physically impaired actor working in little theater who has long engaged in “silent standing” as a form of social action; a woman who dropped out of school after becoming disenchanted with the educational system and went on to establish an archive on the LoSheng Leper Sanitorium. A young social activist has also come to help move the possessions of theelderly people who live there alone but cannot find any trance of them aside from the luggage left in the courtyard. These individuals who at first did not know one another congregate without premeditation in the central courtyard of the apartment building...

The film’s production method is an extension of Chen Chieh-jen’s custom of bringing together many people from different backgrounds through the collective process of building a site. This transforms the set into a temporary community and a place where different individuals, having been atomized, can come to know one another, resulting in this film of poetical dialectics.