Pope Leo names Italian Holocaust film ‘Life Is Beautiful’ as one of his favorite movies

JTA — Pope Leo XIV included the 1997 Holocaust movie “Life Is Beautiful” among his four favorite films of all time.

“Life Is Beautiful,” a melodrama by Italian filmmaker and comedian Robert Benigni, follows an Italian Jewish father and his son as they are sent to a Nazi concentration camp. There the father uses humor and misdirection in an effort to hide the truth of the camps from his son.

The film was a global box-office hit and received seven Oscar nominations, winning three. Another movie set during Nazi rule, the 1965 musical “The Sound of Music,” also made the pope’s list, which was rounded out by the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” and Robert Redford’s stark family drama, “Ordinary People.”

Pope Leo did not elaborate on his reasons for the selections in the truncated video posted by Variety announcing a convening of filmmakers at the Vatican that will begin Saturday.

“Life Is Beautiful” has long been a controversial film among Jews. While some embraced it as a fable of spiritual resistance, critics recoiled at the juxtaposition of broad humor with the Holocaust and said it distorted the experience of concentration camp victims and survivors. Among its critics is Mel Brooks, who also objected that Benigni was not Jewish and couldn’t fully understand the Holocaust. (The actor-director’s Catholic father reportedly was held prisoner in Bergen-Belsen during the war.)

The Vatican also announced that several global filmmakers would be attending the upcoming cinema convening, to begin Saturday. Those include Jewish comedy director Judd Apatow; Pawel Pawlikowski, a Polish filmmaker of Jewish descent and the director of the Oscar-winning Holocaust film “Ida”; and Marco Bellochio, the Italian director of a historical film about the 19th-century kidnapping of Italian Jewish boy Edgardo Mortara by the Catholic Church.

The pope, who formerly studied under a Catholic leader of Jewish-Catholic relations in the US, recently held an event marking the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the declaration that overturned centuries of Catholic doctrine by absolving Jews of killing Jesus. At the event, a member of the pope’s Swiss guard allegedly made a spitting gesture toward a Jewish woman guest; the Vatican recently announced an internal investigation into the matter.