Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini is a work of amazing beauty, a lyrical and poetic film set during one of history's most terrible eras. For all its beauty, the film also uncovers great sadness. The wealthy and privileged Finzi-Continis believe that, it they don't allow themselves to see the ugliness around them, they will somehow be protected from it. While they watch their rights, and the rights of other Jews, be gradually taken away by the Fascists, their own inaction and self-chosen isolation contribute to their downfall. The film was a late-career masterpiece from the great Italian neo-Realist director Vittorio de Sica, whose work had by then fallen from favor. Although the style is more poetic and elegiac than in de Sica's neo-Realist classics of the 1940s and 1950s, it manifests his interest in the lives of the displaced and marginalized -- in this case, a family whose wealth and influence could not shelter them from the horrors of the Holocaust.