This season at The Colonial we had a lot of fun with our special series. Audiences enjoyed Reel Outdoors films all about outdoor adventures, Art on Screen documentaries highlighting incredible artists, and Anniversary Classics celebrating films with significant birthdays just to name a few. My personal favorite was our Fly With Me series that we curated just for this year featuring six films allowing the audience to travel vicariously with the film and meet characters who are changed forever by this travel experience. Our six Fly With Me films were The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Motorcycle Diaries, Crazy Rich Asians, Edie, Lost in Translation, and Paul. If you haven’t seen them all yet, I highly recommend curling up with your favorite snack and binge-watching them all on a snowy afternoon. Each offers a great reminder that the world is wide and everyone else is just as weird and wonderful as you. But there is one film that was actually the inspiration for the series but we weren’t able to show it, making it the one that got away, so to speak. Hector and The Search for Happiness, based on the novel by Francois Lelord and originally released in 2014, is one of those great life-affirming films that are smart, genuinely heartfelt, and funny all at the same time. It follows Hector, a psychiatrist (played by Simon Pegg) who embarks on a journey to study what makes people happy while making stops in China, Tibet, Africa, and the US. Hector travels with a remarkably open heart in the face of real danger and along the way confronts the fears and insecurities holding him back from his best life. Ultimately, it’s a journey from tidy to authentic and it’s really fun to watch. So what happened to the film? I’ll spare you the inside baseball, but suffice it to say that the tangled web of distribution deals and Hollywood bankruptcies can occasionally leave a movie stranded. Fortunately for you, this amazing little film is still available on Amazon Prime! Give it a try and consider it the seventh film in the Fly With Me series. Check out the trailer here.
Enjoy!