Search Film, Company, People...

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

By Julian SCHNABEL

PATHE PRODUCTION LTD. - as SALES All rights, World

Drama - Completed 2007

- Year of production
- 2007
- Genres
- Drama
- Countries
- FRANCE
- Languages
- FRENCH
- Duration
- 120 mn
- Director(s)
- Julian SCHNABEL
- Writer(s)
- Ronald HARWOOD
- Cast
- Mathieu AMALRIC, Marie-Josée CROZE, Emmanuelle SEIGNER, Emma DE CAUNES, Anne CONSIGNY, Max VON SYDOW
- ISAN
- 0000-0001-D4F3-0000-N-0000-0000-5
- Producer(s)
- Kathleen KENNEDY, Jon KILIK
- Synopsis
- On December 8, 1995 at 43, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the inventive and charismatic editor in chief of the magazine French Elle suffered a massive stroke and his brain stem was rendered inactive, his life was changed forever. After lapsing into a coma, he awoke 20 days later to find himself the victim of locked-in syndrome—mentally alert but a prisoner inside of his own body, his only means of communicating with the outside world the blinking of his left eye.
  Forced to adjust to this unique perspective, Bauby created a new rich world by looking into himself to find the only two things that weren't paralyzed, his imagination and his memory. At the Maritime Hospital in Berck-Sur-Mer, in Nord Pas de Calais France he was taught an alphabet, a code in the order of the most frequently used letters in the French alphabet. Letter by letter painstakingly words, sentences, paragraphs tell the story of a profound adventure into the human psyche and into the battle between life and death. This alphabet unlocked the prison of Jean-Dominique's body which he called his Diving Bell and travelled the borderless regions of freedom that he called the Butterfly.