The anni di piombo, the leaden years, ended around 1980. The 1980s brought great changes in politics and society, for example with the old party system ending, reinforced in 1990/91 by the end of Eastern European Socialism. Cinema in the 1980s went into an existential crisis, losing a part of the audience to the unregulated new market of private television. It was not until the 1990s that cinema found an economic and aesthetic restart. On the one hand, the old masters, Fellini and Antonioni, made their last films, and their successor generation like Bertolucci, Bellocchio, the Taviani brothers, and others continued their work. On the other hand, a new generation formed the Nuovo Cinema Italiano. Nanni Moretti, Gianni Amelio, Daniele Luchetti, and female directors like Francesca Archibugi and Cristina Comencini created an original new accent of a more intimate and personal cinema. Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo cinema paradiso (Cinema Paradiso) had a worldwide success (Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film 1990). Two actor-directors achieved the greatest success on the domestic market. They represent a special form of Italian comic cinema, based exclusively on the personal ‘mask’ of the comedian, a form with a long tradition in popular theater genres in Italy: Massimo Troisi and Roberto Benigni. Benigni’s tragicomedy La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful, 3 Academy Awards 1999) was the absolute international highpoint of this kind of cinema. The film aroused substantial discussions worldwide about whether it is possible or allowable to treat the holocaust in the form of comedy.