Keywords

Italian film, cinema, Roberto Benigni, Academy Award, La vita è bella, Life is Beautiful

Abstract

In 1999 the 71st Academy Awards ceremony awarded to the film The Last Days the prize for Best Documentary Feature. Underwritten by Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, this documentary depicts in a compelling, historically objective fashion what the Nazi regime called the "Endlösung" ["Final Solution"]: the effort to annihilate all of European Jewry. In the film, five Hungarian survivors are interviews with honesty and compassion. Their answers record history as it unwound. Clearly, the intent of the interviews is to assure that historical facts are not falsified, nor taken for granted. Documentaries of this kind can attempt to transmit the past to future generations without intentional distortions.

Original Publication Citation

"'Life Is Beautiful, or Is It?,' Asked Jacob the Liar," Rocky Mountain Review, 64.1 (2010): 17-31.