Dorottya Zurbó is a film director and university teacher in Budapest, Hungary.
Her most recent feature length documentary (co-directed by Arun Bhattarai), Agent of Happiness debuted at Sundance Film Festival 2024 where it was a Grand Jury Prize nominee. The film is a playful exploration of Bhutan’s happiness index policy through the journey of a happiness agent. The film has won awards at the San Francisco FF, the Margaret Mead FF, Biografilm, Millenium Docs Against Gravity Festival, MakeDox and MAMI. It has played at over 100 film festivals around the world (CPH:DOX; Sheffield; HotDocs, IDFA, Sydney FF, Zurich FF, Thessaloniki IDF, DocsBarcelona, Durban IFF, MAMI etc.). It has also been theatrically released and will be distributed on leading digital platforms.
Dorottya’s first feature-length documentary The Next Guardian (co-directed by Arun Bhattarai), - an intimate family story set in Bhutan - premiered at IDFA - International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam in the First Appearance Competition in 2017. Since then, it has been screened at more than 40 international festivals (True/False, San Francisco IFF, MoMA DocFortnight etc.). Parallelly, she worked on her first directorial debut Easy Lessons, a feature-length documentary about a young Somalian refugee girl who tries to adapt to Hungary, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival Critics Week section in 2018. The film participated in more than 40 international festivals (HotDocs, Sarajevo IFF, Camden IDFF etc.) receiving awards such as the Hungarian Critics Award for Best Documentary in 2019.
She graduated from the first edition of DocNomads Joint Master in documentary directing for which she was awarded full Erasmus Mundus scholarship in Lisbon, Budapest and Brussels in 2014. She also holds a PhD degree in the field of documentary and transmedia from the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest. She is a Berlinale Talent and took part in the Nipkow Fellowship program. Beside filmmaking, in the last 10 years she has been teaching and mentoring at the prestigious DocNomads Joint Master program in Europe.