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Life Is Beautiful (Italian: La vita è bella) is a 1997 Italian language film which tells the story of an Italian Jew, Guido Orefice (played by Roberto Benigni, who also directed and co-wrote the film), who lives in his own romantic fairy tale world, but must learn how to use his fertile imagination to help his son survive their internment in a Nazi concentration camp.
TitleThe title derives from Leon Trotsky's last testament;[citation needed] while in exile in Mexico, knowing he was soon to be assassinated by Stalin's agents, Trotsky saw his wife in the garden and wrote:
PlotSpoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
In the second half of the movie, Guido, his uncle, and Giosuè are taken to a concentration camp on Giosuè's birthday. Not wanting to leave her family, Dora asks to be allowed to join them and is permitted to do so. In an attempt at keeping up Giosuè's spirits, Guido convinces him that the camp is just a game – a game in which the first person to get a thousand points wins a tank. He tells Giosuè that if you complain for hunger you lose points, while quiet boys who hide from the camp guards earn points, etc. He convinces Giosuè that the camp guards are mean because they want the tank for themselves, that all the other children are hiding in order to win the game, and puts off every attempt of Giosuè's ending the game and returning home by convincing him that they are in the lead for the tank. Despite being surrounded by rampant death and disease, Giosuè doesn't question this fiction both because of his father's convincing performance and his own innocence. Guido maintains this story right until the end, when – in the chaos caused by the American advance drawing near – he tells his son to stay in a sweatbox until everybody has left, this being the final test before the tank is his. After trying to warn Dora that the trucks go to the gas chambers, Guido is caught, taken away, and is shot by a Nazi guard, but not before making his son laugh one last time. Giosuè managed to survive, and he thinks he won the game when an American tank arrives to liberate the camp, and is reunited with Dora, his mother. The movie twice includes music from Offenbach's operetta Les Contes d'Hoffmann (Tales of Hoffmann), with its melody "Barcarola". It is first played at an opera house during Guido's and Dora's courtship; later, Guido surreptitiously plays it over the concentration camp's loudspeaker in an effort to communicate hope to his wife and others. Awards
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