Story
The film “Life is Beautiful” begins when the protagonist Guido, of Jewish origin, embarks on a trip with his friend Ferruccio Papini to Arezzo, an Italian city where his uncle Eliseo Orefice was. The reason for his visit was to work with him as a waiter. Later, he meets the mother of his son, Dora; who at the beginning was engaged to a fascist officer, Rodolfo.
Guido, without knowing it at first, intends to conquer her through the game and finally, before Dora is committed to Rodolfo, she decides to escape with Guido. Until then, the film portrays the political changes that were generated in his country; Despite the invasion of the Nazis in Italy, both continue with their normal lives: Guido worked in his bookstore and Dora worked as a teacher, and they had a son named Josue.
When Guido was celebrating his son’s birthday, the Germans entered to his house and took him, his son Joshua, and his uncle. Guido’s wife went o look for him along with his mother and when she found out what happened, she went out in search of her family. She talked to the German who directed and gave the order to get on the different wagons of the train and to the specific place where they had to arrive. She demanded to get on that train. On the other hand, thanks to Guido’s observation, analysis skills, and sense of humor, he is able to modify the way others observe reality, so he creates a fantasy that turns the whole situation into a game for his son Joshua. When they arrived at the Nazi concentration camp, Guido pretends to be a translator supposedly with the same language as the Germans to interpret the companions of the same cell where they were, the rules they had to comply with, the punishments if they did not comply and what was going to happen to them. Joshua, his son, believes everything his father interpreted. He believes that he will win if the grumpy German guards do not see him, and completes the activities to win in the score. His father promised to put him in a real tank because of his birthday. the German guards take them as prisoners and must work and go through tough situations, and the same time he hides his son Joshua all the time because if they find his son, they would send it to the showers where they kill people who can not work and children.
Later on, he lets his wife know that they are alive, since she was in a cell of pure women.
After, Guido hides his son and he pretends to be a woman to go look for Dora. They discovered him and a German guard pursued him, grabbed him and at the end they take him to an alley in the Nazi concentration camp and kill him with multiple shots. These executions were due to the fact that the Nazis had lost the war and because they had lost it, they decided to kill all or almost all the people who had prisoners in their concentration camps. The next day the Americans arrived to end this revolution and the Germans ran and stayed outside. When Joshua left where his father hid him, a giant tank came in with an American inside. He takes him to find his mother and says mama mama, we have the real tank and that’s where the story of this film ends.
Problem Statement in the Movie
In the film, Life is Beautiful, was made with undeniable honesty, raised in its moment controversies in many parts to present the theme of the Holocaust mixed with certain traits of humor, which at no time are offensive to the Jewish people but can be interpreted as a trivialization of such tragedy. The Holocaust is a central fact for our understanding of Western civilization, the nation state and modern bureaucratic society, as well as human nature. It was the premeditated mass murder of millions of innocent civilians. Driven by a racist ideology that regarded Jews as ‘undesirable parasites’ worthy only of eradication, the Nazis implemented genocide on an unprecedented scale. They chose all the Jews of Europe for destruction: the sick and the healthy, the rich and the poor, the religious Orthodox and the converted to Christianity, the elderly and the young, including children.
Approximately two out of every three Jews who lived in Europe before the war were killed in the Holocaust. When the Second World War ended in 1945, six million European Jews had died; More than a million of the victims were children. Even these statistics are misleading, since most of the survivors lived in areas of Europe not occupied by Germany during the war: areas of the eastern Soviet Union, Great Britain, Bulgaria and neutral states such as Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden. Tens of thousands of Jews also survived in Europe under German occupation hidden or as prisoners in concentration camps until liberation. The Germans and their collaborators were relentless in capturing and killing the Jews in the areas of Europe they controlled.
Much has been written about what happened during the Holocaust era and about where, when and how the Nazis carried out their murderous plans. However, to begin to understand the actions of the Nazis, it is first necessary to analyze and understand the theoretical basis that led them to conceive such plans. An examination of the principles of the Nazi ideology of race explains in part its implacable commitment to the physical annihilation of European Jews.
We can see the expansion of Nazism since the new economic system that Hitler was planting improved the German way of life. Therefore the German people relied on political and economic matters, and this turn made them blindly believe in their form of government, and thus can not see clearly the situation that was lived in Germany. Also, the film gives us a positive vision of how to live life, and that as human beings we are always in conflict, such as emotional, economic, temperamental problems, among others.
Politics/ Social Environment
In the same way, the reality for each of the people who met in this place varies by the way they lived their context. For men, their reality lay in the heavy work they did for the Nazi soldiers; however, for the women their reality was to work in the kitchen and for the children was to obey orders while they shared with others without knowing their future , and for the elderly it was the wait for the day they were called to the ‘shower’.
Each of them interacted with the world in a different way by emerging different emotions, but in the majority a similar social construction was generated, turning them all into subjects who do not act with their environment, who only follow the rules that are governed within this, nourished by the anguish of the arrival of the day when they would simply be murdered.
In the movie, the protagonist at every moment tries not to stagnate and tries to overcome the issues as best as possible. The character of Guido shows us that part, whatever happens, you have to enjoy and laugh about life, in addition to motivate us to be able to continue with any problem that threatens freedom.
As is the case with this film, it is contextualized during the Second World War, authoritarianism, fascism and German discrimination dominated. The Nazis community considered themselves as a pure race, but for them, the Jews belonged to another inferior race. The Jews belonged to a race as inferior, that the Nazis no longer considered them as “persons”. The ideological concept of the race of the Nazis, while classifying the Jews as the priority ‘enemy’, also pointed to other groups for persecution, imprisonment and annihilation. These groups included Roma (gypsies), disabled people, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and Afro-Germans. The Nazis also identify themselves as enemies and as a security risk, the parents, the parents, the homosexuals and the alleged antisocials, whether they consciously join the Nazi regime or the aspect of their behavior did not fit the Nazi perceptions of social norms. They sought to eliminate national mavericks and racial calls through a perpetual purge of German society.The most shocking, from my point of view, is to visualize how you can reach a balance in life, because Guido despite everything that happens to him, did not drop and fought like a warrior for what he wanted, without attacking others, nor affect himself.
Conclusion
In this aspect Guido looks at life with optimism, as if every second were the last, and above all with tons of humor. At no time collapses before the war, and with it, makes this war was a game between his son and him. In this way, he makes his son live the terrible Second World War, but he lives by playing and is not marked by what was that massacre. In the end the
film leaves an impressive message because even though Dad dies, Josué does not suffer from all the traumas that he caused him to have been in the racist and degrading conditions in which the Germans had the Jews. It can be asserted that the film shows us a contribution from the different disciplines framed within the experience and the experiential, since making use of comedy makes reference to the historical moment of German Nazism and its implications on Jewish society and of other ethnicities.
The personal valuation of this film is that it reflects quite well how was the life of a Jew at that time in which by the simple fact of being Jewish and living in Nazi Europe, you already had death assured. One of the teachings of this film is to live day to day, no matter how bad we have to endure always enjoy every moment, because we do not know what will happen afterwards, time goes by and this never recovers, what we do not do today we may never do, we will always have a why to fight and get ahead. To conclude, this film lets us see that life can be as beautiful as we want to see, since everyone is the owner of their life and lives it as they want, let’s not spend time thinking in the problems and difficulties that are presented to us, every day we live is amazing. Enjoy, enjoy every wonderful moment we can live next to the people around us, stop complaining about any struggle we find in the middle of the road that also makes part of life and to form us as beautiful people.
