Director Maria Bertrand’s documentary Finding Happy tells the story of how one wounded sparrow with a busted beak sent her from her backyard all the way to elephants in Thailand.
Maria Bertrand moved from Montreal to Los Angeles to chase a modeling and acting career, but her true calling was writing and telling stories. What she missed most was having an animal around, so she adopted a rescue dog named Moon. Then the pandemic hit, and the world went quiet in a way that wasn’t good. Less than two months in, she found a sparrow on the ground outside with a broken beak. Birds with a beak like that are usually put down. Maria didn’t do that.
She hand-raised the sparrow, figured out how to feed it, and gave it the name Happy. Not long after, her rescue dog Moon died, and the bird that had started as a rescue project turned into Maria’s new best friend. Maria documented the experience on social media, and that bond led her to look for others who found their way back to normalcy through an animal.
In Dallas, there’s Cheryl, who built a bond with a goose named Honk that wandered in and stuck around. One story led to another, and Maria started piecing together how many people out there had found this same kind of connection without ever talking about it. This included a story about a sheep and a pig, showing that our best friend doesn’t always have to be a dog or a cat. This journey took Maria outside the United States, including a stop in Thailand to see elephants, while back home she kept finding more of these stories.
Maria Bertrand shares a quiet moment with an elephant in Thailand in Finding Happy.
“Less than two months in, she found a sparrow on the ground outside with a broken beak.”
While watching Finding Happy, I kept coming back to one of the pandemic’s main side effects: we spent a year and a half losing our connections to people. But here, that isolation didn’t cut us off from our subjects. Instead of human connection, COVID pushed them toward animals. Not just the cats and dogs everybody defaults to, either. Finding Happy makes a pretty good case that the connection goes much deeper and much weirder than that.
Maria Bertrand is the documentary’s through-line. She’d already found some of that compassion in her hairless dog, Moon, but it was the sparrow she found on the street that became her primary project during lockdown. That gave her an outlet to express love to another creature — and get it back in return.
From there, the film keeps handing the baton to somebody new: a sheep, a pig, and a goose, subject after subject who opened their hearts to humans and in turn became more than just another pet.
Finding Happy is a complex story, and Bertrand finds the perfect pace to tell all of these stories of friendship. The doc is engaging from start to finish, which is a testament to her storytelling ability.
If you like steak, yes — Finding Happy does push the vegetarian angle a bit hard, and I get it. You don’t spend all this time saving an animal only to turn around and eat it. But even this gentle nudging has a bigger point: we’re a lot more tied to the animal kingdom than we like to admit. There’s a great deal of positivity in the end. Documentaries don’t always have to dig into the worst of humanity to be compelling. Finding Happy is proof that the best of humanity works just fine too.
For screening information, visit the Finding Happy official website.
"…engaging from start to finish..."
