THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

Thursday, October 18-------THE DIVIING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, the latest film from painter-turned-director Julian Schnabel has won the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize, which will be presented at the Hamptons International Film Festival this weekend. For the 8th consecutive year, the $25,000 cash prize is being awarded to a feature-length film that explores science and technology themes in fresh, innovative ways and depicts scientists and engineers in a realistic and compelling fashion.

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (LE SCHAPHANDRE ET LE PAPILLON), to be released in November by Miramax Films, is based on the famed memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby, with an adapted screenplay by Oscar winning playwright Ronald Harwood. The film stars Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze and Anne Consigny.  Artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel (BASQUIAT, BEFORE NIGHT FALLS), who received Best Director honors at this year's Cannes Film Festival, has created a stunning visual masterpiece based on the memoirs of Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, 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. The film will screen at the Festival this weekend, with the director participating in a special panel discussion.

The Sloan Award Jury praised the film "for its powerful story about how the mind can function independently while trapped inside a stroke-ravaged body, and for its accurate and poetic depiction of a novel technology for translating the mind's unspoken thoughts, teeming memories and soaring imagination into letters, words and sentences so that everyone may hear them." The film, which is bound to appear on Top Ten lists this season, could also snag Schnabel his first Oscar nomination.

Sandy Mandelberger, Awards Watch Editor