One More Day of Light

Field Note: Why Stories Outlive the People Who Tell Them

Good Forever

The Actor Awards were held in Los Angeles recently. You know the routine. Glamour, long speeches, lifetime achievements.

And then the In Memoriam segment.

This year, it lingered a little longer for me. We said goodbye to a number of familiar faces, including Catherine O’Hara, whose work had quietly followed many of us for decades. During the tribute, a clip from one of her final roles was played. She offered a line that has stayed with me.

“When it all comes together, and you make a good movie, it’s good forever.”

I have been thinking about that sentence ever since. People pass. But the beauty they create remains behind to help the rest of us. A good film keeps doing its work long after the cameras stop rolling. It is why I have stopped making excuses for my love of movies.

A great film is one of the most powerful tools for empathy we have. It opens a door you didn’t know was closed. It sits you down next to a stranger’s life and says, “Stay here a minute. Feel what this feels like.”

Roberto Benigni’s 1997 film Life Is Beautiful does exactly that.

It is a comedy set during the Holocaust. That premise makes people nervous because we rightly believe some darkness is too deep for laughter. But Benigni isn’t laughing at suffering. He is showing us what a father refuses to put down, even when the world is falling apart.

The Question at the Window

The story follows Guido, a Jewish-Italian man of inexplicable optimism, and his young son, Giosuè. There is a scene early in the film that I think about almost once a month.

Father and son are walking through town on an ordinary afternoon. The little boy stops outside a pastry shop window. He presses his face to the glass with that absolute commitment children have. He just wants to find a treat for his mother.

Just above his head is a sign: Forbidden entry to Jews and dogs.

Giosuè sounds out the words slowly. He looks up at his father with the clearest eyes in the world.

“Why, Papa?”

The air goes out of the room. There is no honest answer a father should have to give his five-year-old on a Tuesday afternoon outside a shop.

So, Guido makes one up. He tells his son that a hardware store down the road doesn’t allow horses or Spaniards. He says a pharmacist he knows won’t serve people who own kangaroos. He shrugs it off as a silly preference.

Some might call it a lie.

I think it was love.

Guido was buying time.

He wasn’t hiding from the truth. The truth was coming, and he knew it. But he refused to let hatred write the first chapter of his son’s understanding of the world. He was saying, “You are not going to carry this weight yet. Not today.”

The Game in the Dark

When they are eventually taken to a concentration camp, Guido keeps the story going. He tells his son the camp is a giant game. You earn points for good behaviour, and the first person to reach a thousand points wins a real army tank.

The horror is present in every frame of the film. We see the smoke and the suffering. Guido isn’t pretending to himself. He is pretending for his son. It costs him every ounce of his energy and his dignity to keep the “game” alive, but he never wavers.

This film doesn’t suggest that staying positive stops evil. It doesn’t pretend that a happy ending is guaranteed for everyone.

We get to choose what we carry to the centre of the story.

Guido chose a stubborn, creative, and ridiculous kind of love. He didn’t do it because it would save him. He did it because love was the only thing worth being made of.

One More Day of Light

I think about that father when the news is heavy, and the world feels as if it is out of balance. It is hard to explain the “why” of a broken world to anyone young enough to still ask.

But we can choose what we carry. We can choose to protect the hearts of those around us. Sometimes love means telling the hard truth. Other times, it looks like a father on a sidewalk, thinking fast, offering a child one more day of light.¹

That is not just a movie ending. It is a way of being alive.

When the world feels heavy, what’s one story of hope you keep close to keep the light alive?

1. John 1:5 - “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”