Life is beautiful (1997)

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Movie
German title Life is Beautiful
Original title La vita è bella
Country of production Italy
original language Italian , German , English
Publishing year 1997
length 116 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Roberto Benigni
script Vincenzo Cerami
Roberto Benigni
production Gianluigi Braschi
Elda Ferri
John M. Davis
music Nicola Piovani
camera Tonino Delli Colli
cut Simona Paggi
occupation

Life is Beautiful (Original title: La vita è bella [la ˈviːta ɛ ˈbɛlla] ) is a 1997 Italian film directed by Roberto Benigni , co-wrote the script and starred.

action

The tragicomedy is set on the fringes of World War II and consists of two plot sections that are about the same length. The first half tells of how the Jewish Italian Guido copes with his life in a humorous way, courting his "beloved princess" Dora and finally winning her as a wife. While Dora works as a teacher in a small Italian town, Guido runs a small bookstore, in which their son Giosuè sometimes helps. The fact that Giosuè has fun with a toy tank gets its meaning in the second part of the story.

This begins with the deportation of Guido and Giosuè to a National Socialist concentration camp . Dora also voluntarily allows herself to be brought into the camp, whose inmates are forced to do heavy labor under inhumane conditions. In order to protect his son and save him from the horrific reality, Guido tells him that the stay is a complicated game, the rules of which they have to follow exactly in order to win a real tank in the end. The father tries everything possible to make his son's stay in the camp as pleasant as possible and to maintain the façade of deception.

When the camp got into turmoil at the end of the war, Guido disguised himself as a woman in order to get to the women's department undetected and look for his wife Dora. But he is discovered and shot, while Giosuè, still unsuspecting and following the last instructions of his father, hides. The next day, the child is picked up in the abandoned camp by an American tank driver and taken away, which is why it believes it has actually won the game. Soon afterwards Giosuè, sitting on "his" tank and driving along a long line of freed prisoners, finds his mother again and excitedly tells her about his win, the real tank. The film ends with his words “This is my story, this is the sacrifice my father made, this was his gift to me. We won the game. "

Film music

  1. Buon giorno principessa
  2. La vita è bella
  3. Viva Giosuè
  4. Grand Hotel Valse
  5. La notte di favola
  6. La notte di fuga
  7. Le uova nel has
  8. Grand Hotel Fox
  9. Il treno nel buio
  10. Arriva il carro armato
  11. Valse larmoyante
  12. L'uovo di struzzo - danza etiope
  13. Cabbage wrack
  14. Il gioco di Giosuè
  15. Barcarole
  16. Guido e ferruccio
  17. Abbiamo vinto

production

The film was shot from November 1996 to April 1997 in Arezzo , Montevarchi , Castiglion Fiorentino , Cortona , Ronciglione and Papigno . The concentration camp in the film is actually an old factory near Terni . Shlomo Venezia , survivor of Auschwitz , and the historian Marcello Pezzetti advised the director.

Life is beautiful was the last film by cameraman Tonino Delli Colli .

background

Benigni's father spent two years in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp , and La vita è bella is based in part on his experience.

synchronization

The German synchronization was based on a dialogue book by Jörg Hartung. Joachim Tennstedt was responsible for the dialogue.

role Actress Voice actor
Guido Orefice Roberto Benigni Joachim Tennstedt
Dora Nicoletta Braschi Susanna Bonaséwicz
Eliseo Orefice Giustino Durano Hermann Ebeling
Giosuè Orefice Giorgio Cantarini Till Völger
Dr. Lessing Horst Buchholz Horst Buchholz
School inspector Giuliana Lojodice Ruth Küllenberg

See also

  • The Day the Clown Cried ; Thematically similar previous film, which however was never released. Lewis' reaction to Life is Beautiful 2015: “Benigni stole the idea from me, but he did well. He didn't act properly, but it's a wonderful movie. "

reception

Gross profit

With grossing US $ 228.9 million , Life is Beautiful was the world's most successful Italian film to date, but in Italy alone it was relegated to second place in 2011 by the film Che bella giornata .

criticism

“The film, designed to praise the power of fantasy and the human will to survive, begins as a lively romance with fairy-tale undertones and ends in a bitter-absurd tragedy in which laughter freezes into a painful reflex. The attempt to use the tragic-comic to remember the Holocaust remains a highly ambivalent affair, but the film, staged with great sensitivity and seriousness, deserves respect as a moving attempt to create cinematic images in a special way for unbreakable dignity to find the Holocaust victims. The rigor, guided by deep humanity, with which a topic caught in taboo zones and ciphers is approached, becomes a completely unique event. "

- Lexicon of international film

literature

  • Corinna Schlicht: Laughing at the Holocaust: Investigations into Roberto Benigni's “La vita è bella”. In this. (Ed.): Life plans. Literary and film studies analyzes. Karl Maria Laufen, Oberhausen 2005. ISBN 3-87468-213-7 . Pp. 150-159.
  • Tobias Ebbrecht: Images of history in media memory. Cinematic narratives of the Holocaust. transcript, Bielefeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-8376-1671-2 , pp. 183-202.

Awards

The film received the following awards, among others:

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Day the Clown Cried on welt.de/Kultur
  2. ↑ Box office results in the Internet Movie Database accessed on October 18, 2010
  3. ↑ Life is beautiful. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  4. ↑ Life is Beautiful ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Retrieved December 28, 2010. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / awardsdatabase.oscars.org