Acclaimed artist and film director Julian Schnabel will be honored for his work at this year’s Lucca Film Festival and receive a Lifetime Achievement Award, Lucca announced Friday.
Schnabel will attend the festival in Tuscany and participate in a public masterclass. Luca will be showing a retrospective of these films, including his most recent, In Dante’s hand.
Schnabel will receive his award at Dante’s hand Examination. The Netflix film, adapted from Nick Tochis’s 2002 novel, features a star cast led by Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot and Gerard Butler, and includes Jason Momoa, Al Pacino and Martin Scorsese. The film premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival last year.
Schnabel first rose to prominence as a painter, becoming a star in the New York art scene in the 1980s for his “panel paintings,” large-scale canvases covered in shards of broken ceramic plates. He made his directorial debut in 1996 with Basquiata biographical film about the late street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, with Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat and David Bowie as Andy Warhol. The film premiered in Venice to great success, grossing over $3 million in domestic release.
Chappelle’s follow-up, literary adaptation Before night falls (2000), also premiered in Venice, won the Special Jury Prize and the Silver Lion for Best Actor for Javier Bardem, who received the Academy Award for Best Actor for the same role. Before night falls It was also an independent hit, grossing over $8.6 million worldwide.
Schnabel’s third advantage, Diving bell and butterfly (2007), premiered at Cannes, and won the Best Director award. The film is based on the autobiographical book by Jean-Dominique Bauby, about his experience with locked-in syndrome, starring stars Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Seigner. The film won Schnabel a Golden Globe for Best Director and received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film. It was also Schnabel’s most commercially successful film, earning $20 million worldwide.
Includes newer features Miral (2010), starring Freida Pinto, and a biopic of Vincent van Gogh At the gate of eternity (2018), with Willem Dafoe, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
Previous LUCA Lifetime honorees include David Lynch, Paul Schrader and Alfonso Cuaron. The 2026 Lucca Film Festival takes place from September 26 to October 4.
