Ira Sachs: Last News

An NC-17 rating for a film may as well be a scarlet letter branded on it before release, limiting its audiences and causing certain theaters not to carry it at all. But that branding won’t stop MUBI and Ira Sachs from debuting “Passages,” Sachs’ latest, in theaters next month.

Filmmaker Ira Sachs has called the Motion Picture Association’s decision to give his film an NC-17 rating “a form of cultural censorship.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Ira Sachs’ sexy Sundance drama “Passages” has received an NC-17 rating by the MPA but will be released unrated by MUBI, the distributor confirms to Variety. MUBI called the rating “unexpected” and said it was “deeply disappointed by the MPA’s decision.” “MUBI has officially rejected this NC-17 rating,” the distributor added. “MUBI remains committed to releasing ‘Passages’ nationwide in its original version as the filmmaker intended, with our full backing, unrated and uncut.” “Passages” centers on a love triangle in Paris between a movie director (Franz Rogowski), his artist husband (Ben Whishaw) and a grade-school teacher (Adèle Exarchapoulos, no stranger to NC-17 controversies as the star of “Blue Is the Warmest Color”) he meets out one night. The film includes several sex scenes in which the actors are fully nude, but none of them are salacious or gratuitous. One scene centers on the husbands having sex and is shot in an unbroken long take that runs just over two minutes.

Naman Ramachandran Actor and producer Jonathan Lipnicki has joined production, post-production and distribution company Buffalo 8 as an executive producer. Lipnicki made a mark with his performance alongside Tom Cruise in “Jerry Maguire,” before becoming the lead in the family franchise “Stuart Little.” He will soon be seen in the upcoming TBS show “The Joe Schmo Show,” Peter Pardini’s film “Man Goes on Rant” and Britt Robertson-led film “The Re-Education of Molly Singer.” Lipnicki will play a key role in packaging and project development within Buffalo 8’s EP services division, identifying storytelling opportunities and bringing together top-tier talent based on his extensive relationships spanning Hollywood studio films through to the independent sector.

Love is a complicated thing.

Our review from Sundance put it perfectly in its opening line. Filmmaker “Ira Sachs prefers relationships of the doomed variety.” Throughout the indie writer/director’s career, Sachs has— in films like “Love Is Strange,” “Little Men,” “Keep the Lights On” and especially in his debut, “The Delta”—explored the difficulties and traumas of love and how the best intentions can go sour.

The 10th Sundance Film Festival: London runs July 6-9 and will feature an industry section with keynote sessions led by A24 Execs Harpa Manku and Tom Lazenby and new London Film Festival head Kristy Matheson.

Today, Outfest announced the centerpiece events and special awardees that will headline the 41st Outfest Los Angeles Summer Festival presented by Warner Bros. Discovery and Genesis Motor America, taking place July 13 – 23 in venues around Los Angeles.

Passages, the “sexy and sad” romantic drama from writer-director Ira Sachs, and Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovani Project, the festival aims to celebrate the community that’s been there for decades.Other highlights of this year’s festival include It’s Only Life After All, a newly-minted documentary about the Indigo Girls, the Argentinian drama Horseplay, and Nelly & Nadine, a poignant documentary about two women who, after their release from Ravensbrück concentration camp, forged a life of companionship and love.Cinema Art executive director Helen Chamberlin, a native Washingtonian who spent her summers as a youth in Rehoboth, has watched the area’s community evolve over the years. “I remember it was very prevalent that there was an LGBT — or LGB — community here in Rehoboth back in the mid-seventies,” she recalls.“When I looked at the original mini film festival that they did for this community — when I got here, it was called ‘LGBTQ Cine-brations’ — I thought to myself, ‘You know, Pride has become such a huge phenomenon globally…let’s get in the game here.”Getting in the game meant re-branding the festival, scheduling it during Pride Month, maintaining partnerships with organizations like festival co-presenter CAMP Rehoboth, and going after some of the most buzzed-about queer-themed titles to premiere this year at Sundance and Berlin.“When you rebrand something, you have to grow your audience,” says Chamberlin, who stepped into her role at the Cinema Art and the Rehoboth Beach Film Society a year ago.

Of all the buzzy films that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, like “Past Lives,” “Eileen,” and the Grand Jury Prize winner “A Thousand And One,” Ira Sachs‘ “Passages” is undoubtedly the sexiest. And by year’s end, it may rank higher than those other three on critics’ top 10 lists for 2023.

Todd Longwell It is often said that the secret to becoming a successful entrepreneur is finding a need and filling it. When Santa Monica-based BondIt Media Capital launched in 2013, it zeroed in on the deposits productions must leave with SAG-AFTRA, DGA, IATSE and other guilds to ensure that their members get paid in a timely fashion.  The company co-founders — CEO Matthew Helderman and COO Luke Taylor — knew from their experience working in the production trenches that these deposits, which sometimes take up to six months to be returned, can create a significant cash flow problem for low-budget projects during principal photography. 

EXCLUSIVE: The 33rd annual Inside Out Toronto 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival has revealed its full film lineup.

Mubi is adding over 50 features from the Sony Pictures’ library to its U.S. streaming service. The mix of studio and arthouse fare includes Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, The Last Picture Show by Peter Bogdanovich and films from Wes Anderson, Pedro Almodovar and Guillermo Del Toro.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Global indie streamer distributor and producer MUBI has acquired all rights in several key European territories to “Passages,” the erotic drama by Ira Sachs that bowed with a splash at Sundance and just had its European premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Following the world premiere of “Passages” at Sundance MUBI last month snapped up all rights for the U.S., U.K., Ireland and Latin America to the U.S. indie darling director’s first film shot in France. Now MUBI has acquired additional European territories on “Passages” including for Germany, Austria, Italy, Turkey and Benelux. The Benelux pickup is in partnership with Belgium’s Imagine Film Distribution.

The Sundance Film Festival has begun unveiling its Jury and Audience Award winners for 2023.

Mubi has taken the U.S., UK, Ireland and Latin America on the Ira Sachs directed title Passages which made its world premiere in the premiere section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Ira Sachs’ latest film centers on a three-way relationship between two men and a woman as they navigate their way through love, lust and heartbreak. Passages begins on a film set. Tomas (Franz Rogowski), a German man in Paris, is directing a period piece. On set, he’s a hardass, always yelling, screaming and nitpicking about small things. After shooting, he goes to the film wrap party with his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw), but he is less than enthusiastic about the event, so he leaves the forlorn Tomas alone to dance with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). The two head to another party, and without any indication that they even like each other, they have sex. Maybe it’s the first time he’s had sex with a woman, and he tells his husband about it as if he is supposed to be happy for him? Of course, this starts an argument between the two, which leads to Martin walking out. 

Ira Sachs prefers relationships of the doomed variety — tempestuous passions torn asunder, sometimes by external forces like capitalism, which complicated the search for a home through New York’s cutthroat real estate market in “Love Is Strange” and “Little Men.” His latest film — the sexy, frustrating, loose-yet-compact, altogether irresistible three-hander “Passages” — also concerns property contracts and a homeless protagonist. However, this one’s got nobody but himself to blame for that predicament, fluent as he is in the same toxic strain of amour fou that previously perfumed the air in “Keep the Lights On” and especially Sachs’ debut, “The Delta.” As in that film — also pitched at the admirably humble quotidian scale Sachs hasn’t felt the need to exceed in more than a quarter decade — “Passages” follows a bisexual chaos agent so wrapped up in his own narcissism that he can’t see where his self-exploration ends and insensitivity to those around him begins.

We are just under two weeks away from the kickoff of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. However, the folks at Sundance aren’t done announcing new additions to the festival lineup.

The Berlin Film Festival has unveiled the first titles selected for its Panorama section at the upcoming in-person edition that takes place February 16-26. (Scroll down for the full list)

The 2023 Sundance Film Festival is almost a month away and this morning the Sundance Institute revealed the Indie Episodic and Short Film slates for the festival. 64 shorts were selected from 10,981 submissions, the highest on record.