Roberto benigni and nicoletta braschi 2017

1997 Italian film by Roberto Benigni

This article is about the 1997 Italian film. For other uses, see Life Is Beautiful (disambiguation).

"La vita è bella" redirects here. For other uses, see La vita è bella (disambiguation).

Life Is Beautiful (Italian: La vita è bella, Italian:[laˈviːtaˈɛbˈbɛlla]) is a 1997 Italian periodcomedy-drama film directed by and starring Roberto Benigni, who co-wrote the film with Vincenzo Cerami. Benigni plays Guido Orefice, a Jewish Italian bookshop owner, who employs his imagination to shield his son from the horrors of internment in a Nazi concentration camp. The film was partially inspired by the book In the End, I Beat Hitler by Rubino Romeo Salmonì and by Benigni's father, who spent two years in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II.

The film was an overwhelming critical and commercial success. Despite some criticisms of using the subject matter for comedic purposes, it received widespread acclaim, with critics praising its story, performances and direction, and the union of drama and comedy. The movie grossed over $230 million worldwide, including $57.6 million in the United States, is the second highest-grossing foreign language film in the U.S. (after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and one of the highest-grossing non-English language movies of all time. The National Board of Review included it in the top five best foreign films of 1998.

The movie won the Grand Prix at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, nine David di Donatello Awards (including Best Film), five Nastro d'Argento Awards in Italy, two European Film Awards, and three Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor for Benigni, the first for a male non-English performance.

Plot

Part I

In 1939, in Fascist Italy, Guido Orefice is a young Italian Jewish man who arrives to work in the city of Arezzo, in Tuscany, where his uncle

Married for 25 years, they first met in 1983. Roberto Benigni was making the movie Tu Mi Turbi and chose this unknown actress from Cesena to play Maria.

“There is a ‘before and after’ with her”, said Benigni. “Before her everything (in my life) was a joke: but comedy without a feminine is like a life half-lived, one you can’t imagine.”

Roberto Benigni was talking about his wife, Nicoletta Braschi.

“From then on, since she entered my life, we have done everything together like a theater company, it was her idea to give ourselves freedom by producing our own films”, he added. “She gave me truth. When I was flying, she brought me back to earth. I can’t imagine another face, another presence, another breath that isn’t hers.”

He says that she is always on the set with him, “Or rather, most of the time. The only time she wasn’t there with me is when she had the flu.”

In March of this year, Roberto Benigni was award a special David for his life’s work,and he said that he wasn’t going to thank his wife, Nicoletta, but share the David with her: I did it with her, for her, and thanks to her’

For Benigni’s part, he’s the only Italian man to receive an Oscar for Best Actor for starring in a foreign language film (La Vita È Bella), and he was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.

Their most successful collaborations have been the 1998 Oscar Winning La Vita è Bella (Life is Beautiful) (1998) and Johnny Stecchino in 1992, a comedy that cast Braschi as the girlfriend of a mobster (Benigni), and was a big hit in Italy.

In La Vita È Bella Benigni plays an Italian Jewish man who tries to protect his son when they are placed in a concentration camp by telling him that the Holocaust is game they are playing and trying to win. Benigni’s own father spent three years in a camp at Bergen-Belsen and the film is based partly on his fa