¿Es usted feliz?
2013 · 12m · España
Directed by Fernando Mancha
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
Fifty years after Jean Rouch first asked Parisians whether they were happy, a new documentary takes to the streets of Paris to ask the same question about happiness today.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Rouch's original *Chronique d'un été* is basically a sacred text, so remaking it 50 years later should be unbearable—but Mancha's willingness to let the premise sit in its own contradiction, to ask if the question itself has aged, is genuinely perverse in the best way.
Mancha understands the lineage here with real precision: he's not just echoing Rouch's method, he's interrogating what it means to return to the same street, the same question, the same formal apparatus after half a century of cinema and history have moved on—that's the kind of essayistic rigor that justifies the form.
The film's entire architecture hinges on one editing decision: cutting between the 1961 footage and today's responses in strict alternation, which forces you to feel the temporal distance not as information but as a physical rhythm—that single formal choice is what makes the repetition sing instead of suffocate.