Ira Sachs

Ira Sachs is a NYC-based filmmaker whose feature films include Passages, Little Men, Love is Strange, Keep the Lights On and Forty Shades of Blue, winner of the 2005 Sundance Dramatic Grand Jury Prize. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, as well as an artist resident at MacDowell and Yaddo, Sachs has been a frequent Advisor at the Sundance Directors and Screenwriters Labs since the early 2000s. His work is in the permanent collections at MoMA and the Whitney Museum of Art, and in 2009, Sachs founded Queer | Art, a non-profit arts organization now in its 15th year, that provides mentorship and support for queer and trans artists across disciplines and generations.

Read about Ira Sachs at imdb.com

Peter Hujar’s Day

A film by Ira Sachs

2025 - USA/Germany - Drama

Based on a richly cinematic rendering of a conversation recorded in 1974 between photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz the film re-imagines their talk that day in a single 24-hour period in the life of Hujar, the brilliant and famously uncompromising artist who was one of the most important figures in downtown New York's legendary cultural scene of the 1970s and 1980s.

Set entirely in Linda's Manhattan apartment, the film freely and imaginatively recreates that long-ago afternoon and the wonderfully discursive exchange between these two singular individuals. As the photographer vividly describes his interactions with leading cultural figures of the time, including Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag, as well as the challenges of living on limited financial resources in 1970s New York, Peter Hujar's Day transforms unexpectedly into a Bloomsday-like meditation on both an artist's life and time itself.

Keep the Lights On

A film by Ira Sachs

2012 - USA - Drama

The story chronicles an emotionally and sexually charged journey of two men in New York City through love, friendship, and addiction. Documentary filmmaker Erik and closeted lawyer Paul meet through a casual encounter, but soon find a deeper connection and become a couple. Individually and together, they are risk takers — compulsive, and fueled by drugs and sex. In an almost decade-long relationship defined by highs, lows, and dysfunctional patterns, Erik struggles to negotiate his own boundaries and dignity while being true to himself.