Life Is Beautiful
Director: Roberto Benigni
Genre: Comedy, War film, World cinema, Romance Film, Comedy-drama, Tragicomedy, Drama
Year: 1997
Country: Italy
Language: English Language, German Language, Italian Language
Starring: Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giustino Durano, Giorgio Cantarini, Sergio Bini Bustric, Horst Buchholz, Amerigo Fontani, Giuliana Lojodice, Marisa Paredes, Lidia Alfonsi, Claudio Alfonsi, Raffaella Lebboroni, Pietro De Silva, Francesco Guzzo
Life Is Beautiful (Italian: La vita รจ bella) is a 1997 Italian film which tells the story of a Jewish Italian, Guido Orefice (played by Roberto Benigni, who also directed and co-wrote the film), who must employ his fertile imagination to help his family during their internment in a Nazi concentration camp. Part of the film came from Benigni's own family history; before his birth Roberto's father had survived three years of internment at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
At the 71st Academy Awards in 1999, Benigni won the Academy Award for Best Actor and the film won both the Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
The first half of the movie is a whimsical, romantic, somewhat slapstick comedy set in the years before World War II.
Guido is both funny and charismatic, especially when he romances a local school teacher, Dora (portrayed by Benigni's actual wife Nicoletta Braschi), saying she is beautiful like the morning sunrise. Dora, however, comes from a wealthy, aristocratic, non-Jewish Italian family. Dora's mother wants her to marry a well-to-do civil servant, but Dora falls instead for Guido, who ends up stealing
(This is information generated from a Wikipedia article, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.)
Internet Movie Database