The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is an Academy Award nominated 2007 film directed by Julian Schnabel and written by Ronald Harwood. It is based on the French memoir Le Scaphandre et le Papillon by Jean-Dominique Bauby.
The film describes Bauby's life after suffering a massive stroke at the age of 43, which left him with a condition known as locked-in syndrome. The condition paralyzed him; his only remaining means of communication was the blinking of his left eyelid. The film premiered in competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival on May 22, where Schnabel won, two weeks later, the Award for Best Director. Schnabel also won Best Director at the 65th Golden Globe Awards, where the film won Best Foreign Language Film.
Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, in 1995 at the age of 43, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire body, except his left eye. Using that eye to blink out his memoir, Bauby eloquently described the aspects of his interior world, from the psychological torment of being trapped inside his body to his imagined stories from lands he'd only visited in his mind. Written by Anonymous
