Acclaimed artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel will be honored for his work at this year’s Lucca Film Festival, received a Lifetime Achievement Award, Lucca announced Friday.
Schnabel will attend the festival in Tuscany and take part in a public masterclass. Lucca will screen a retrospective of this films, including his latest, In the Hand of Dante.
Schnabel will receive his award at the Hand of Dante screening. The Netflix feature, adapted from Nick Tosches’ 2002 novel, features an all-star cast led by Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot and Gerard Butler and features 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 of the 1980s New York art scene for his “plate paintings” large scale canvases covered with shards of broken ceramic plates. He made his debut as a director in 1996 with Basquiat, a biopic on the late street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, with Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat and David Bowie as Andy Warhol. The film premiered in Venice and was a sleeper hit, earning more than $3 million in domestic release.
Schabel’s follow-up, the literary adaptation Before Night Falls (2000), also premiered in Venice, winning a special Jury Prize and the Best Actor Silver Lion for lead Javier Bardem, who would go on to secure a Best Actor Oscar nom for the same role. Before Night Falls was also an indie success, earning more than $8.6 million worldwide.
Schnabel’s third feature, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), premiered in Cannes, winning Best Director. The adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s autobiographical book, about his experience with locked-in syndrome, stars Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Seigner. The film won Schnabel the Best Director Golden Globe and received four Oscar nominations, including for Best Director and for Best Foreign Language Film. It was also Schnabel’s most commercially-successful film, earning $20 million worldwide.
More recent features include Miral (2010), starring Freida Pinto, and the Vincent van Gogh biopic At Eternity’s Gate (2018), with Willem Dafoe, who received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
Previous Lucca lifetime honorees have included David Lynch, Paul Schrader and Alfonso Cuarón. The 2026 Lucca Film Festival runs Sept. 26 – Oct. 4.