L Vida Es Bella

In 1939 Italy, Guido Orefice is a young Jewish man who is leaving his old life and going to the city where his uncle lives for work. Guido is comical and sharp, making the best from each situation he encounters. From the start he literally falls in love with Dora. Later he sees her again in the city where she is a teacher. Dora is set to be engaged to a rich but arrogant man. He is a local government official with whom Guido has run-ins from the beginning. Guido is in love with Dora and performs many stunts in order to see her. Guido sets up many "coincidental" incidents to show his interest. Finally Dora sees Guido's affection and promise and gives in against her head. He steals her from her engagement party on a horse, humiliating her fiancé and mother. Soon they are married and have a son, Joshua.

Through the first part, the film depicts the changing political climate in Italy: Guido frequently imitates members of the National Fascist Party, skewering their racist logic and pseudoscientific reasoning (at one point, jumping onto a table to demonstrate his "perfect Aryan bellybutton"). However, the growing Fascist wave is also evident: the horse Guido steals Dora away on has been painted green and covered in antisemitic insults. Later during World War II, after Dora and her mother have reconciled, Guido, his Uncle Eliseo and Joshua are seized on Joshua's birthday. They and many other Jews are forced onto a train and taken to a concentration camp.

In the camp, Guido hides their true situation from his son. Guido explains to Joshua that the camp is a complicated game in which Joshua must perform the tasks Guido gives him. Joshua is at times reluctant to go along with the game, but Guido convinces him each time to continue on. Guido sets up the concentration camp as a game for Joshua. Each of the tasks will earn them points and whoever gets to one thousand points first will win a tank. He tells him that if he cries, complains that he wants his mother, or says that he is hungry, he will lose points, while quiet boys who hide from the camp guards earn extra points. Guido uses this game to explain features of the concentration camp that would otherwise be scary for a young child: the guards are mean only because they want the tank for themselves; the dwindling numbers of children (who are being killed) are only hiding in order to score more points than Joshua so they can win the game. He puts off Joshua's requests to end the game and return home by convincing him that they are in the lead for the tank, and need only wait a short while before they can return home with their tank.

Despite being surrounded by the misery, sickness, and death at the camp, Joshua does not question this fiction because of his father's convincing performance and his own innocence. Guido maintains this story right until the end when, in the chaos of shutting down the camp as the Americans approach, he tells his

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