Life Is Beautiful

Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella) won the Grand Prix at Cannes 1998 and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 71st Academy Awards in 1999, alongside Best Actor (Benigni) and Best Original Dramatic Score (Nicola Piovani). Benigni's lead-acting Oscar made him the first man ever to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for a non-English-speaking performance. The film became one of the most internationally consequential pieces of post-war Italian-Jewish cinema and one of the most-debated Holocaust films of any decade.

Guido Orefice (Benigni), a charming and irrepressibly optimistic Jewish-Italian man working as a waiter in a small Tuscan town in the late 1930s, falls in love with the schoolteacher Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni's real-life wife). The first half of the film follows their courtship, marriage and the early years of their family life with their young son Giosuè (Giorgio Cantarini). The second half, after the family's deportation to a Nazi concentration camp during the late-war German occupation of Italy, follows Guido's attempt to shield his small son from the actual horror of their environment.

The film's central structural commitment (to combining broad commedia-italiana physical comedy with one of the most morally serious historical subjects in twentieth-century European history) produced one of the most-debated works in contemporary cinema. Critical reception has been sharply divided in different periods; the film's continuing reach in international family-viewing audiences has been substantial. Piovani's score, the central performances of Benigni and Cantarini, and the sustained tonal commitment all anchor the film's continuing reception.