“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. 

Starring in the film are Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, Luther Ford, Rebecca Hall, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. The film began production on a 28-day shoot in New York on September 21, 2025, and wrapped on October 29. However, Sachs has said it took him and Zacharias 15 years to craft the film’s story, which he said was inspired by Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh.  

“This is our sixth film together,” Sachs said of Zacharias. “We’ve been talking about this time and some story set in this time since we started working together in 2010, so it’s been brewing for a long time.” 

He added: “I think when I began the film, it felt like I was making some sort of biography about many of the artists that I was familiar with who had died at that time, but also lived at that time. When I finished the film, it felt more like an autobiography, to be honest, because the personal resonance of being in New York and being a young gay man in that time of incredible energy but also a lot of darkness is very close to me. 

Sachs’s last two features, Passages and Peter Hujar’s Day, had buzzy roll-outs following Sundance and Berlin premieres. The filmmaker was last in Cannes with the 2019 feature Frankie. WME is handling U.S., and mk2 is on international sales for The Man I Love. Cannes runs until May 23.

Check out our full interview with Sachs above. 

The Deadline Studio at Cannes is sponsored by SCAD.