Life Is Beautiful (1997)
- To accurately portray their role in Life Is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director Roberto Benigni.
- Life Is Beautiful utilized mostly practical sets and locations to ground the story, a specific choice insisted upon by Roberto Benigni.
Life Is Beautiful is a 1997 Italian comedy-drama film directed by and starring Roberto Benigni. The film follows Guido Orefice, a charming, imaginative Jewish-Italian bookshop owner who uses humor, wit, and an elaborate fantasy to protect his young son Giosué from the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. The first half of the film is a lighthearted romantic comedy set in 1930s Tuscany, as Guido courts and marries the beautiful Dora through a series of enchanting comic set pieces.
The second half shifts dramatically as the family is deported to a concentration camp, where Guido tells Giosué that the entire experience is an elaborate game with a grand prize — a real tank — awarded to whoever accumulates the most points by following the rules, which Guido invents to keep his son hidden and alive. Life Is Beautiful was one of the most celebrated and controversial foreign-language films of the 1990s. Roberto Benigni's performance — physically exuberant, emotionally devastating, and walking an extraordinarily fine line between comedy and tragedy — earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor, making him only the second person to win for a performance in a non-English language film.
The film also won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Dramatic Score. Benigni's acceptance speech, in which he climbed over seat backs to reach the stage, became one of the most joyous moments in Oscar history. The film earned $229 million worldwide.
Critics debated whether the film's comedic approach to the Holocaust was appropriate, but many praised Benigni for finding a way to honor the resilience of the human spirit without trivializing the suffering.
