Jewish-Italian Culture: “Life is Beautiful”
There are so many different cultures in the world that we live in today. It is super important to learn about these different cultures and backgrounds because it encourages diversity and it helps understand where people came from or how their culture started and where it was at first compared to where it is now.
The movie that I watched was called “Life is Beautiful.” It was based on the Jewish Italian culture around between the time frame of five years before World War II up until World War II and through the war. I purchased it on YouTube. It had Italian subtitles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1qggoumYi0
Most of the settings were either in homes, restaurants, or the streets of Arezzo, Italy to begin with. The later settings were in a labor concentration camp when World War II began. Throughout the movie, I first noticed that they dressed very formal. They were put together whenever they left their house and usually dressed formal on their day-to-day activities. Their days revolved around food, work, family, and socialization. That is what I grasped from the Italian culture. Later in the movie, I realized that the Jewish culture was utterly discriminated against and that is why they were forced into concentration camps when World War II occurred. Since the movie was based in Italy for the beginning, before they were put into labor camps, all of the cultural aspects that I noted were Italian.
Some of the similarities of this culture was that food is a big presence in my family. All of our family events are based upon food. However, some of the differences is that, in my culture my family does not dress very formal all of the time. My family as a whole, lives in different places. My brothers and my parents all live under one roof, but we our schedules are always so backwards that we do not always eat dinner together. In the movie, it seemed as if they were all super close in distance to one another. That is not the case with my family. In the movie, they travel through train, bikes, walking, and cute little authentic cars in the movie. Also, in some instances they are on horse. For fun, they go out with friends, they go out on dates with each other, well the parents do, and the three people in the family (father, mother, and son) spend time together making life fun. Ultimately, they value family.
When the father, Guido, son, Giosue, and uncle Eliseo are put into concentration camps, because they are partly Jewish, the mother, Dora joins them even though she is fully Italian. She goes because she does not want to leave her family. However, she is put with the women and the son and father are put with the men. The father does whatever it takes to convince his five-year-old son that the concentration camps are all a part of a game as he tries to find a way to get his family out of them. They all value family and that is the core value that they all share.
The political situation had to do with the World War II. That turned their life upside down. However, it showed just how much the father cared about the family because he continually sacrificed himself in the movie so that his father and son could be free. Mostly before they entered the depressing and bland concentration camps, the streets of Italy looked like cities. They were authentic and it just looked like a dream. Buildings and stores were next to each other with restaurants along the streets. Mostly everybody was dressed formal, they were with family and friends, on bikes, everyone so happy, all the eating going on. The beginning part of the movie was like a dream.
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