Must-watchWorld War II · Film · 1997
Life Is Beautiful
La vita è bella
Guido, a Jewish waiter with a clown's imagination, charms a schoolteacher in 1930s Arezzo; years later, deported with his little son, he convinces the boy that the camp is an elaborate game with a real tank as the prize.
Where it happened
Follow the story across 2 places.
Stop 1: Arezzo, Tuscany
Key location
Guido arrives to work at his uncle's hotel and, through a string of comic coincidences, wins over the teacher Dora.
Stop 2: Arezzo under German occupation
On Giosuè's birthday, Guido and his son are taken away, and Dora insists on boarding the deportation train with them.
What really happened
Mussolini's racial laws of 1938 expelled Italian Jews from schools, public jobs and many professions, the discrimination that creeps into Guido's life in the first half of the film. After Italy's armistice in September 1943 the Germans occupied the north and centre of the country and, with the help of the Salò republic's police, began rounding Jews up; about 7,500 Italian Jews died in the Holocaust, most of them at Auschwitz.
The camp in the film is deliberately unnamed and stylised, and its liberation by an American tank does not match Auschwitz, which the Soviet army reached in January 1945. Benigni drew on his father's two years in a German labour camp and on the memoir of Auschwitz survivor Rubino Romeo Salmonì.
Where to watch
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Full details
- Original title
- La vita è bella
- Directed by
- Roberto Benigni
- Countries
- Italy
- Languages
- Italian, German, English
- Released
- 1997
- Period
- –
- Theaters of war
- Mediterranean & Africa
- Themes
- Holocaust
- Comedy
- Romance
