Cyprus, Greece, France
Eliza can't smile – but her job as a hotel worker constantly demands she put on a happy face. Can she navigate our absurd world of toxic positivity while remaining true to herself?
We live in a time saturated with compulsory optimism.
Social media, self-help culture, and a growing industry of “experts” relentlessly instruct us to look on the bright side,
to reframe every difficulty, to silence negativity as if it were a personal failure.
This cultural imperative (often described as toxic positivity), promotes shallow optimism as a moral virtue, offering quick emotional fixes while quietly tolerating, and even normalising, inequality, exhaustion, and emotional alienation.
I am, by nature, an optimist. I genuinely believe that choosing hope can be a small but radical act in a world that repeatedly insists on its own bleakness. Yet I find it deeply paradoxical that in a culture so obsessed with happiness, we allow ourselves so little space to process discomfort, grief, or ambivalence.
If relentless positivity were the answer, how have we arrived at a moment defined by unprecedented levels of stress, depression, and burnout?
FREE ELIZA emerges from this contradiction. The film sets out to explore the contemporary landscape of toxic positivity through a slightly surreal lens: one that observes rather than judges, and that allows discomfort, humor, and tenderness to coexist.
At its core, FREE ELIZA centres on an idiosyncratic heroine about whom we know very little. Conflict, as it is traditionally understood, is largely absent. This is a conscious formal choice. Instead of a plot driven by escalation, the film unfolds as a mosaic of vignettes, small, contained moments that gradually illuminate Eliza’s inner world. My aim is to create an emotional connection that is subtle rather than declarative, allowing meaning to accumulate through observation, rhythm, and repetition.
The film draws inspiration from the humanism and deadpan precision of Roy Andersson, flirts with the thematic preoccupations of Ruben Östlund, and borrows something from the unsettling humor of THE WHITE LOTUS. Like these works, FREE ELIZA uses irony and restraint not to distance the viewer, but to invite reflection.
In a world obsessed with the performance of happiness, Eliza endures the demand to smile, to appear “normal,” despite her perceived inability to conform. But this so-called disability does not diminish her capacity for joy; it simply reveals how narrow our definitions of happiness have become. Ultimately, the film does not argue against optimism, but against its coercive form. Sadness, loss, and suffering are not deviations to be corrected; they are fundamental aspects of being alive.
By the end of the film, I hope audiences will hold the possibility that Eliza may not be the heroine we conventionally celebrate, but perhaps she is the one we all need right now.
Eliza can't smile – but her job as a hotel worker constantly demands she put on a happy face. Can she navigate our absurd world of toxic positivity while remaining true to herself?
