Finding Bliss ★★★ – Odyssey: A Chinese Cinema Season 2023

An engaging and enjoyable documentary, Finding Bliss is a piece that, when it works, works tremendously well. Showing us that keeping our spirits up and, importantly, positively fuelled is integral to getting the most out of our short time on this planet.

Resignation, Frustration and Helplessness is what we all face as humans living on this planet. In a place like Hong Kong, these conditions are intensified and magnified by the densely populated living conditions. The pressures of just trying to survive in the big city are already enough to drive people into extreme physical, emotional, and mental conditions. These extreme conditions can cause humans to lock up in every way.

Hong Kong ranks as the 74th saddest population in the world. People are tense, feeling the pressure to succeed at all times; living in these big cities causes involuntary tension. The stresses of earning enough money to get by, coupled with countless other worries, soon become unbearable weights on our backs, pushing us down. Yet, there are countries that rank higher, but what are they doing to have such lofty relaxed positions? It is here where Directors Kim Chan and Dee Lam reel us in.

So Josie Ho’s experiment begins with a group of Hong Kong citizens feeling that intense strain of just figuring out how to get by. Can they feel the lifting of pressure upon themselves with some techniques? With a mixture of sessions from Jim Cham and having the students visit Iceland (one of the countries that ranked highly in the happiest populations in the world), we get to see how the opening of minds and the breaking of cultural barriers enables them to see their world in a different light.

What Finding Bliss does most of all is make you want to join one of Jim Chim’s sessions; you feel as if he could loosen and crack a smile of the stiffest of souls. You watch his techniques and immediately find yourself smiling and wanting to join in. His enthusiasm is simply infectious. This is important, as unless you have been to improv-style lessons, you do not realise how rigid you are as a person. Sure, you can move with the flow of the waves, but you are still following someone else’s motion and not creating your own.

He has you thinking that such exercises or experiences should be made mandatory in some form. To have the chance to separate yourself from the world or environment you find yourself in, even just for an hour, would feel sublime. Will it ever happen? Of course not, but to experience it in some form, even the teamwork of everyone as a whole running across a room to dodge the large rope that loops over them, is fascinating. You see quick progress, how suddenly a group of individuals can become a team and enjoy being a part of one.

The combining of Icelandic culture with what these Hong Kong citizens are used to drives Finding Bliss; both actually learn from each other, and it just shows just how important it is to not just stay in your own culture, not to stagnate, but to cross into others, to learn, experience and transform your own culture for good. If you are not nudging yourself along in some form, you are missing out on so much, and that is what you get from this documentary; exploring in any fashion should result in something good.

While these moments work to enhance the overall documentary, it is also the self-recorded pieces we are provided that allow us to see what the participants are really thinking. They note their progress and how these exercises and experiences are allowing them to be who they feel they should be in their private life.

By giving the students and, as such, the audience so many forms of art as a method of relaxing and finding yourself, Finding Bliss shows us the integrity of art and creativity, not solely from a cultural viewpoint, but from a psychological one. In a world where it feels like every ounce of energy is being rinsed out of us by our employers or financial strains. To have something externally stimulating is essential to not become trapped.

However, all of this is not as world-changing as the documentary would lead you to believe, but that could be a cultural difference. In Europe, we are allowed to be freer and explore such facets of our life, but that is clearly not the case in Hong Kong. So, while you may not be from a country or city that is as goal minded and straining on its citizens, there is still a lot to take away from Finding Bliss. You just have to know what clicks for you, that’s all.

It doesn’t always nail its point home as well as you would like it to; Finding Bliss leaves a mark on you. One to also open yourself up; you never quite know what positive outcome might come from it.

★★★

For more information on Odyssey: A Chinese Cinema Season click here

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