Ira Sachs On Tapping Into The “Incredible Energy” & “Darkness” Of 1980s New York For ‘The Man I Love’: “It Felt Like An Autobiography” — Cannes Studio

“You speak about the film as if I made a film about the past, and I don’t feel that way,” filmmaker Ira Sachs says of his latest feature, The Man I Love, which debuted this week in Competition at Cannes. 

“Partly because of the tone of the film, which was made very much in the present tense, but also because of the continuity I’ve had from that period until now. It just feels like it’s part of a long story.”

Directed by Sachs from a screenplay he co-wrote with Mauricio Zacharias, the film is set in 1980s New York and follows Jimmy George, a Downtown performance artist, who is currently living in an “extraordinary moment between great illness and death when, still, all beauty and love is possible,” the official synopsis reads. 

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