Le Scaphandre et le Papillon

Translated into The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, this film is probably one of the most impressionable ones I have ever seen.  The fact that the entire movie is in french made me hesitant to watch it, but I remembered the name from being nominated for oscars a few years ago so i decided to give it a try.  It quickly held my attention more than most english speaking movies ever can.  This incredible true story is about a man named Jean-Do.  He is the editor in chief of Elle magazine and has suffered a massive stroke that leaves him completely paralyzed and unable to speak which is known as "locked in syndrome".  The only thing he has control over is his left eye.  We hear his thoughts in his head as he can think clearly and rationally.  He states that other then his eye there are two things that are not paralyzed, his imagination and his memory.  Almost 80 percent of the movie is entirely through the view of his left eye.  As he lays motionless in the hospital bed, his speech therapist teaches him a method to communicate using his eye by blinking.  She recites every letter in the alphabet and he blinks when she says the letter and repeats this until he spells out what he wants to say.  They also tell him to blink once for yes and twice for no.  After a few months, he decides to use this method to write a memoir (which this movie is based on).  A young woman named Claude was sent to dictate and write down what he spells.  The process of him spelling out every word was extremely tedious and painstaking and only half a page was completed a day.  She would go to him every day, recite the alphabet repeatedly, and wait for him to blink and write down letters that develop sentences.  Throughout the movie, we see flashbacks of his life where he is with his father or playing with his three children.  Two days after his memoir is published, he dies from pneumonia.  This film was very moving and the cinematography was incredible.  The fact that it is all in french is completely irrelevant.