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Life Is Beautiful

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Life Is Beautiful
Yonathan Woldu
Professor Ballow
Speech 1311 – S70
17 September 2014

A Fathers Love for His Son In the hilarious yet sorrowful film “Life is Beautiful”, the main character Guido, who was played by Oscar winning actor Roberto Benigni who also directed and co-wrote this film, helps his son and wife Dora, played by Nicoletta Braschi who is Benigni real life wife, survive the horrors of a Jewish Concentration Camp through his sense of humor and imagination. Though there were scenes about what went on during the holocaust, it was only a backdrop to the films true meaning. The movie starts out when Guido, who was working at his uncle’s hotel at the time, meets a beautiful girl name Dora who was already engaged to a fascist official. This doesn’t stop Guido from trying to sweep her off her feet. He arrives at her engagement party riding a horse with anti-Semitic slurs written all over its body. Dora gets on the horse with Guido and ride off to the night. Several years’ later, Guido and Dora are married and have a son, Giosue. Through the use of symbolic interactionism, interpersonal deception, and nonverbal communication, Guido helps his family survive the holocaust by using his humor, compassion, and analytical thinking skills. Nonverbal communication can be defined as the process of communicating through sending and receiving wordless cues between people. It includes things like facial expression, posture, body language, stance, and gesture. Guido applied symbolic interaction theory by creating “reality” for his son. His son thinks that everything he’s saying is true and that the events that were happening was just part of the game. He didn’t realize this until the very end of the movie when he narrated the scene where he was a young child hugging his mom due to the fact that he thought he won the game. Interpersonal deception theory says that people make “less than completely honest statements” to avoid hurting other people. Guido makes things better by laughing

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