Even before they had seen his film, they clapped and cheered him - a horse-faced little Italian who had made a slapstick comedy set in the Holocaust. He made his way to the front of the hall, stood at a microphone he had no need for, and told them at excruciating volume that he loved them all and that, were time only to permit, he would make love to each of them in turn. They laughed, cheered some more, and sat back to watch his movie.
This week's love affair between Jerusalem cinema audiences and Roberto Benigni, the comedian who co-wrote, directed and stars in La Vita E Bella - Life is Beautiful - says as much about Jewish sensibilities 50 years after the Holocaust as it does about his film.
In the 1950s, '60s, '70s and even '80s, no sane distributor would have dared screen a movie that weaves light and childlike humour into the darkness of a Nazi concentration camp. Even now, in the late 1990s, organisers of the Jerusalem Film Festival, at which the movie had its Israeli premiere, were wary. They needn't have worried. The Jerusalem audiences were almost universally won over by the film - as Italian audiences and the jurors at Cannes had been before them. Life is Beautiful was awarded the second highest prize at Cannes, and has been the second most successful film in Italy this past year, beaten at the box office only by Titanic.
Mr Benigni's Holocaust comedy, in which he stars as Guido, a Jewish waiter-turned-bookseller, is a film of two halves. In the first, the sunny part, Guido woos and literally rides off with his beloved Dora, interrupting her wedding to a leading fascist to pluck her away on horseback. In the second, the dark part, the couple and their young son are sent to a concentration camp.
And it is here that Mr Benigni marries humour with extraordinary sensitivity - as Guido persuades his terrified five-year-old son that the horrors all around him are part of an elaborate game, and that if he can conquer his fears and evade the guards, he'll get to drive home in his own tank.
In one central scene, Guido, who knows no German, volunteers to translate a camp guard's cruel shouted orders to the terrified barracks, and renders the dire threats of punishment and death harmless by translating the harangue into the "rules of the game": points awarded for staying out of sight, points lost for showing fear or asking for more food.
One Italian critic has accused Mr Benigni of enabling Italians "to laugh and be freed of any responsibility".
But Mr Benigni defended himself adroitly, highlighting the research he'd put into the movie, insisting that this was not an exercise in making fun of the Holocaust, and noting that a new generation of Italians were now asking their parents about what had happened in that period.
"I put my soul, my heart, my body" into the film, he said. "This was the best thing I knew how to do."