Welcome to Global Breakouts, Deadline’s strand in which, each fortnight, we shine a spotlight on the TV shows and films killing it in their local territories. The industry is as globalized as it’s ever been, but breakout hits are appearing in pockets of the world all the time and it can be hard to keep track… So, we’re going to do the hard work for you.
Headlines about conflict in Iran have dominated these past months but a small Franco-Iranian web series with big dreams tells a bit of a different story. Pouria Takavar‘s American Honey-inspired show Happiness, which follows a group of reckless young teens trying to find their way in the world, started life on social media but was picked up by commissioners at Arte and now has millions of views. Season 2 is on the horizon and can be seen at the Seriencamp festival in Cologne next week.
Name: HappinessCountry: France and IranProducer: ARTE France, La Onda ProductionsDistributor: ARTE social media channelsFor fans of: American Honey
Iranian teenagers are defined by so much more than the place they are from, and they have the same dreams, hopes and expectations as the rest of us.
That notion is the driving force behind Happiness, a French-Iranian Arte short-form series many years in the making that places the spotlight on Iran and young Iranians, including those who have settled in other countries around the world, and sometimes gets a bit messy.
The second season of Happiness premieres next week at Seriencamp, five years after the first took the Cologne fest by storm and nearly a decade after the idea started germinating in the mind of director Pouria Takavar. It is a truly organic production, one that started with Takavar simply shooting footage of the teens around him and has now ramped up to become a hit for Arte, one of Europe’s most trusted broadcasters. Season 1 amassed nearly five million views across Arte’s VoD player, YouTube and Instagram page dedicated to short-form series.
“The intention behind the show across both seasons has always been the fact that there are not many films and shows about Iranian teenagers,” Takavar tells Deadline in the days before Seriencamp. “However, I believe they are the most valuable people in the country. They are the ones who are about to make the future.”
Takavar had barely exited teenhood himself when he compiled what was to be the catapult for his career, a documentary profiling the 13, 14 and 15 year olds around him. “They weren’t living a life like me, they were like Westeners,” he explains. “They were smoking weed, drinking alcohol and getting tattoos. If you go and search you don’t find much about Iranian teenagers but they have also been on the frontline of these revolutions we have had. So I saw a lot of potential in this and I started thinking about how we are all on a quest to find happiness.”
Among those he filmed was a “hyperactive” teen who “wanted to be super happy but was going through a very hard time,” and she inspired Takavar to create the main character of Shadi, whose name literally translates as “happiness” in Farsi.
He first created an Instagram series titled Tehrun, a play on words about those young bohemian folk who are desperate to leave Iran’s capital, and this caught the eye of commissioners at Arte scouring Instagram for the next big thing. Tehrun slowly morphed into what was to become Happiness.
Starring Ghazal Shojaei as Shadi alongside the likes of Solmaz Ghani, Yasmine Fattahi, Maryam Boubani, Steve Mege and Marie Seux, Happiness Season 1 followed Shadi on a roadtrip through Iran in search of her father. Season 2, which launches June 29, expands the aperture by moving to France, where Shadi has lived for six months and is still struggling to find her way between adaptation and loneliness, before she meets the Franco-Iranian Arezou and starts to open up.
It has taken five years to get these two short-form seasons of Happiness over the line and events have continuously transpired to slow things down.
The first season was greenlit as the world entered Covid-19 and therefore took a long while to get in the can. The second was initially slated to be based in Tehran, where filming would have been on location, but then the Women, Life, Freedom revolution began following the death of Mahsa Amini, and things got tricky.
“We didn’t want to work with the government or have to get permits,” adds Takavar. “I didn’t want to portray an image of girls with veils and hijabs on so it therefore became very risky to film in Iran. So we thought why not do a story about the first generation of migrants in France.”
That story was reflective of the experience of many of the people behind the Happiness camera, including Takavar, who currently lives in Dubai (he won’t travel to Seriencamp as the last time he left Dubai his visa was nearly canceled) and who assembled a diverse writers’ room including second generation Iranian migrants in France.
One such up-and-coming scribe is Sonia Emamzadeh, who was hooked by how Happiness was so “pop and colourful.”
“Usually the movies about Iran that get to Europe or the U.S. are very heavy because it’s in Iran and we know the situation,” she says. “But you can tell a coming-of-age story about a girl rebelling against her mum and wondering about her absent dad anywhere. I absolutely loved it.”
Emamzadeh, a writer on French soap Ici Tout Commence who is also developing a series about an Iranian family making wine, believes Happiness is one of the first shows of its kind in France with a protagonist who is a first generation migrant. She says she was fascinated to “tell the powerful story of Iranians that flee Iran to Europe” and, in this way, Happiness is a “duty of memory.” “I always think to myself what I am writing tells us about the era it’s being written in,” she says. “This is a testimony to what Iranians abroad are going through during this time.”
Towards the end of Season 2 filming last year, the 12-day war started raging between Iran and Israel and some parts of the final episodes were rewritten to take this into account. Since then, Iran has barely kept out the headlines amid the fall of Ayatollah Khameni and the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz.
Takavar says he will be “so sad” if Iran’s internet blackout prevents the nation’s teens from watching Season 2. He lists Andrea Arnold’s American Honey as an inspiration for Happiness but, ultimately, he says it all goes back to the teens he filmed for his very first documentary.
And what next for Happiness? The team aren’t planning anything beyond the premiere but Emamzadeh can’t help but think big.
“The dream scenario would be the fall of the Iranian regime, and coming back to film in Iran,” she says.
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