Now life is beautiful in Iraq:

Having sought to portray a lighter side to Nazi concentration camps, the Italian actor-director Roberto Benigni is looking for love and laughs in wartime Iraq.

The Tiger and the Snow, which Benigni screened in Rome on Tuesday, is a romantic comedy that in many ways follows the Oscar-winning blueprint of his 1997 film Life is Beautiful.

Benigni is again the star, and again chases the woman of his dreams - his real-life wife, Nicoletta Braschi. This time, he must follow her to Baghdad shortly after the US-led invasion in 2003. That takes the film into more difficult terrain as Benigni treads between fact and fiction in a war zone.

If his previous film offered triumphant images of US troops liberating concentration camp victims, Benigni's latest work portrays them as occupying forces - often nervous and unable to communicate with scared Iraqis. He pokes fun at the US search for weapons of mass destruction, playfully taking a flyswatter and joking he has found one of the elusive weapons.

Benigni said his film was mostly a love story, and did not seek to judge US soldiers. He pointed to compassionate moments between troops and his main character, a poet named Attilio de Giovanni.

"The soldiers are seen as a 'presence'. There are no judgements made, for sure," Benigni told a news conference. "Clearly the feeling that arises against war, I think it's very, very, very strong." But he added that this vision came from a main character who, as a poet, loves life.