What is happiness? It could be the most difficult question to answer with words. But could documentaries reflect on the emotion that all human beings want to feel at least once in their lives?
The following documentaries that you can watch online on Guidedoc feature characters who take different - and sometimes unexpected - paths to happiness at three different stages of life.
In case you didn't know, Guidedoc is a global curated documentary streaming platform. You can watch the world's best award-winning documentaries from around the world. We have new movies every day.
Nine-year-old Lilly doesn't need much to feel happy. She lives with her family in a commune in the middle of the forest where she usually goes out to play with her friends in permanent contact with nature.
But what happens to this feeling of satisfaction when life presents us with changes that put us to the test?
This short film follows the challenge Lilly faces in bringing happiness to another place far from the forest when the area where she lives must be vacated by government orders.
Lilly and her family prepare for a tough trip to the city, where a house in a quiet neighborhood awaits.
This film teaches us that happiness is not always tied to a place or a moment, but it can become a home that we can take with us wherever we go.
Watch "Wild Lilly" on Guidedoc
Filmmaker Fréderick Giulliame began to film his intimate life when he learned his wife was pregnant with their first daughter.
Since then he shoots everything in the beginning, from a spiritual ceremony with a Shaman in Peru to prepare for her new role as a father, to the precise moment of the baby's birth. He then keeps filming images that we see before our eyes, beautiful scenes of happiness and fulfillment of a loving family made up of three.
But what we believed indestructible also gives way and Fréderick's film eventually becomes a story of divorce and separation from his beloved daughter. Clear Years is an introspection work that speaks about the malleability of happiness as a muscle that expands and contracts according to the moment we face in our lives.
After a few years, Fréderick is reborn as the phoenix, and that pleasurable emotion comes back to him as a new man.
Watch "Clear Years" on Guidedoc
Is it possible to buy happiness? For the protagonists of this curious documentary, the answer to this question could be positive.
Four Polish women dedicate a significant part of their retirement pensions to buying items compulsively to make their days a little happier.
In this documentary we are a sort of guest in the houses of our characters, who live surrounded by exercise equipment, beauty products, massage beds and other exotic objects with which they usually seek maximum personal pleasure.
This film speaks about how the search for happiness is what really moves us until the autumn of our lives to continue living. In the end, our last smile could be the last thing we own in life.
Watch "Maximum Pleasure" and more great documentaries on Guidedoc