Life is Beautiful

Life is Beautiful (La vita e bella) is a 1997 Italian comedy-drama directed by and starring Roberto Benigni. Benigni’s character is an Italian Jewish father in a family consisting of his wife and small son. In the 1940s they are rounded up and sent to a concentration camp. There the father, in order to hide the reality of their situation from their son and to somehow survive, pretends that their whole experience is a game and that at the end of the game the son, if he succeeds will win a tank.

It is not easy to mix the Holocaust with humor and some criticism of the film highlights that conundrum. It also seems to sidestep politics in favor of human ingenuity. However, the urge to survive in the most terrible of circumstances plays out in the film as the most important imperative.