State of Happiness

This sparse drama follows a Uyghur family in the Tarim Basin whose pastoral life is upended by petroleum prospectors arriving in their valley, dramatizing the same threshold moment when extractive industry knocks on a community's door. The film lingers on the silences between generations as elders weigh the seductive promise of cash against the slow erasure of their grazing lands.

A snowed-in fjord town becomes the stage for investigating how foreign investors, port expansion schemes, and human trafficking have crept into a place that still imagines itself as insular and self-sufficient. The series shows provincial institutions buckling under pressures their inherited civic vocabulary was never built to name.

Two journalists navigate the poisoned creeks of the Niger Delta in search of a kidnapped engineer's wife, mapping how petroleum wealth has hollowed out fishing villages into militant encampments and ecological wastelands. Habila renders the moral arithmetic of communities that traded subsistence for promises that arrived as pipelines and left as ash.

Yamani's jazz-trio meditation refracts the Gulf's oil century through Khaleeji rhythms and dissonant piano, sketching the cultural vertigo of societies that vaulted from pearl diving to skyscrapers within a single lifetime. The compositions hold the ambivalent texture of sudden plenty layered atop deeper, older musical memory.

A treasure hunt across post-war Hokkaido becomes a meditation on how Ainu lifeways are valued, exploited, and translated into capital by outsiders chasing buried gold. The series turns the question of who profits from a frontier's resources into a sustained ethical interrogation of indigenous sovereignty and settler ambition.