HAPPY

Punjab, India. In a farming village called Dhanal Khurd, a boy crouches over his brother's phone in a rapeseed field near the cell tower, listening for the occasional rattlesnake. His name is Happy Singh Soni, and he's watching free clips on YouTube of his favorite film, Godard's Bande à part. When he's not sleeping among the cabbages and eating sugary rotis, Happy dreams of becoming an actor, one who plays the melancholy roles; the sad, pretty boys, rare in Indian cinema.

When an amusement park buys up the neighboring farms, Happy takes a job with them as an attendant, saving money for a clandestine journey to Europe, where he'll finally land a breakout role. Little does he know his immigration is being coordinated by an Italian crime syndicate. After a nightmarish passage to Italy, Happy still manages to find relief in food and fantasy, even as he is forced into ever-worsening work conditions by the syndicate, over a debt he allegedly accrued in transit. He's brought at last to a radish farm, where he lives with two other men in a storage container, working 14-hour shifts. As his disillusionment peaks, he falls in love with a fellow farmhand and finds himself in the middle of a worker uprising. Happy's comedic, poignant narration is often at odds with his reality, one shared by so many migrant workers disenfranchised by systems that depend on their labor. Celina Baljeet Basra is a writer and curator based in Berlin. She graduated from the Free University Berlin, where she studied Art History in a Global Context, and has since worked with Nature Morte Delhi, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Galerie im Turm, Berlin Biennale, Times Art Center Berlin, Talking Objects Lab, and other art institutions at the local and international level. Her residencies include stays with Shanghai Curators Lab and Kochi Biennale and she was awarded both curatorial and literary research scholarships from the Berlin Senate. She is a founder of The Department of Love, a curatorial collective.