Life Is Beautiful

A cheerful Jewish-Italian bookshop owner charms his way into marriage and fatherhood before he and his young son are deported to a Nazi concentration camp. To protect his son's innocence, he invents an elaborate game convincing the boy that the horrors around them are part of a competition. The film blends comedy and tragedy in depicting survival through imagination and love.

Italian Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps following Italy's 1938 racial laws and especially after the German occupation of northern Italy in 1943, with many sent to camps such as Auschwitz, where the majority did not survive.

A fable-like fictional story; the light-hearted tone and premise are deliberately allegorical rather than a literal depiction of camp conditions.

Four assaults over four months were needed to break the Gustav Line and open the road to Rome.

The historic abbey was destroyed by Allied bombing in February 1944; German paratroopers then occupied the ruins. Polish II Corps finally took the monastery hill in May as French colonial troops turned the line in the Aurunci mountains.

Directed by Roberto Benigni

Cast: Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini

Positioned at 1939–1945 within the World War II phase of the war, as part of the Holocaust deportation and concentration camps in Italy and Germany. This is entry 13 of 150 in the chronological archive.

• Holocaust
• concentration camp
• Italian Jews
• father and son
• Benigni

• 

  In Which We Serve

  1939–May 1941

• 

  The Pianist

  1939–1945

• 

  Schindler's List

  1939–1945

• 

  Mediterraneo

  1941–September 1943

• 

  Swing Kids

  1939

• 

  1939 Battle of Westerplatte

  1–7 September 1939