HappyDeal

HappyDeal is the world’s biggest online retailer. As a mega corporation, it has the ability to do things that none of its competitors could ever dream of. One of those things is organizing a giant competition, watched by nearly everyone, where contestants gruellingly race against time for a chance to win housing, and perhaps even a warehouse job with the company. Emma (Marie Kauffmann) is a young mother, living out of her car with her daughter. Today might be her moment of desperately needed opportunity. A viscerally disturbing depiction of a plausible feudalist future world where oligarchal cruelty uses the unfeeling fist of AI to weaponize poverty against an entire population. HAPPYDEAL is a wrenching and subversive blast of hard-hitting storytelling from French sibling filmmakers Alexis and Jérémie Lopez, brilliantly scripted, staged and performed. It just may be the most resonant film you see this year. – Mitch Davis