Julian Schnabel guest at Lucca Film Festival 2026

The American director, screenwriter and artist Julian Schnabel will be the first international guest of the twenty-second edition of the Lucca Film Festival, which will take place in the Tuscan city  from 26 September to 4 October 2026, under the artistic direction of Nicola Borrelli and made possible thanks to the support of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca. Julian Schnabel will receive on the festival stage the Lifetime Achievement Award during a special evening in which he will present – as a special event organized in collaboration with Netflix – also his latest film, In the Hand of Dante, starring, among others, Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Sabrina Impacciatore, Franco Nero, Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino and Jason Momoa. Schnabel will then be the protagonist of an afternoon masterclass at Cinema Astra open to the public and will be honored by the festival with a retrospective of his filmography.

Born in Brooklyn, one of the most celebrated and controversial living painters on the New York scene, well known for his large-scale canvases, portraits and design projects, Schnabel became famous as an artist thanks to his plate paintings, canvases covered with shards of broken plates. His works are held in the collections of MoMA – Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato and MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. As a film director, he made his debut in 1996 with Basquiat, a biographical film about the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, which he also wrote. In 2000 he produced and directed Before Night Falls, an adaptation of the autobiographical novel of the same name by Reinaldo Arenas, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, as well as Javier Bardem’s nomination for Best Actor and the Silver Lion – Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. In 2007 he directed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, starring Mathieu Amalric, an adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s autobiographical book, for which he won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival, also receiving the Golden Globe for Best Director and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. At the Venice International Film Festival in 2010 he presented his film Miral, starring Freida Pinto, in competition. In 2017 director Pappi Corsicato dedicated the documentary L’arte viva di Julian Schnabel (original title: Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait), featuring interviews with Al Pacino, Laurie Anderson, Hector Babenco, Jeff Koons and Willem Dafoe. In 2018 he directed the biopic At Eternity’s Gate, starring Willem Dafoe, also collaborating on the screenplay and editing. In 2025, out of competition, he premiered In the Hand of Dante, based on Nick Tosches’s novel, at the Venice Film Festival.

The Lucca Film Festival will feature feature film and short film competitions and the films competing in LFF For Future, launched in 2023.