by Hudson Moura
Léa Pool’s We’ll Find Happiness (On Sera Heureux) sets its sights on an urgent and worthy subject: queer asylum seekers whose love stories are literally put on trial. The film follows Reza (Aron Archer), whose wedding to a woman unfolds under the shadow of a deeper truth: his love for his best friend Ismaël. Their forbidden relationship in Iran is crushed by homophobic repression; Ismaël is killed, and Reza manages to flee. On the road to exile, he meets Saad (travelling as Karim) (played by Mehdi Meskar), who becomes both companion-in-flight and future partner in Montreal. From the start, the film wants to link intimacy and geopolitics: love as what survives borders, checkpoints, and prisons.
Formally, Pool weaves present-day Montréal with a chain of flashbacks tracing the men’s route: a homeland where homosexuality is criminalized, an open camp in France, a more carceral stop in Spain, hints of sex work and exploitation along the way. These segments are among the film’s strongest: they insist that “arriving” in Canada is never a fresh start but the exhausted endpoint of layered precarity. One striking image—Saad burning his fingerprints to escape biometric tracking—condenses the paradox of queer asylum: when your body is already treated as incriminating evidence, survival demands erasing yourself.
In Montréal, the stakes tighten around migration law and the violence of proof. Reza’s refugee claim falters, and the film’s most searing scene is his hearing before the immigration board, where he is compelled to recount his earliest sexual experiences in humiliating detail to “prove” that he is truly gay and truly persecuted, with no regard for cultural context, trauma, or modesty. Pool pinpoints a brutal paradox of queer asylum regimes: desire must be confessed, performed, and rendered legible in a rigid bureaucratic script, while any omission, hesitation, or non-linear life story is immediately suspect. The sequence hits hard because it mirrors, with painful accuracy, what many LGBTQ+ asylum seekers endure every day.
But for a story navigating such complex terrain, the film leans hard into melodrama—and not always to its advantage. The emotional register is cranked up: betrayals, lies, manipulations, sacrifices, last-minute revelations. Saad’s desperate maneuvers to save Reza risk his own precarious status; Reza’s omission of a shame-marked part of his past becomes a near-path to execution. Everything tends toward a tragic-romantic equation in which love is only “proven” through suffering. Yet these turns often feel schematic—shaped to hit beats rather than emerging from the messy, contradictory calculus of survival—so that characters sometimes serve the plot more than the other way around.
The characters are trapped somewhere between symbol and person. They carry immense representational weight, but the script rarely allows them the contradictory, sometimes unheroic complexity that would make them fully human. We understand their trauma; we see their shame and humiliation before authorities; we glimpse the tenderness between the men. Yet too often they are arranged as vessels for arguments—about exile, love, sacrifice—rather than as subjects whose dense, unruly inner lives truly drive what happens.
One of the film’s most compelling threads is the relationship between Saad and the Québécois civil servant Laurent (Alexandre Landry), whom Saad initially seduces in the hope of securing help for Reza’s case. On paper, it’s rich terrain: a dynamic that starts as transactional, edged with manipulation, and gradually reveals flashes of reciprocity, loneliness, and real connection. Landry plays Laurent with a mix of naivety, decency, and desire that suggests a man who wants to believe he isn’t being used, while also sensing that he might be. Saad, for his part, is clearly torn between survival tactics and the intimacy that unexpectedly emerges. But the film never fully commits to inhabiting this complexity. Scenes between them feel sharply alive, then abruptly truncated, as if the direction were pulling toward moral ambiguity and emotional nuance while the screenplay rushes back to the central melodrama. We’re left with the frustrating sense of an essential relationship sketched and then sidelined, its ethical and emotional stakes never fully explored.
Pool’s direction is earnest, sincere. The film clearly wants to expose how asylum systems re-enact domination: demanding confessions, rewarding spectacle, punishing any deviation from a pre-scripted victim narrative. However, some plot turns strain credulity, and the escalating melodramatic register—especially in the final movements—risks overwhelming the sharp political insight that the material initially promises.
Still, We’ll Find Happiness is valuable for where it points our attention. It insists that queer refugee stories are not abstract “issues” but lived, contradictory, flesh-and-paper realities, structured by suspicion and sacrifice. When it slows down enough to show how love, fear, and bureaucracy entangle, it cuts deep. One only wishes that its considerable empathy were matched by a slightly more grounded dramaturgy—less insistently tragic, more confident in the quiet, devastating politics already present in the simple, obscene question: “Prove to us who you are, or we will send you back.”
Rating: 4/5
The film will be screened at Cinéfranco: Francophone International Film Festival 