Ira Sachs

Ira Sachs (born November 21, 1965) is an American filmmaker. Sachs started his career directing short films such as Vaudeville (1991) and Lady (1993) before making his feature film debut with The Delta (1997). Sachs later won acclaim for his dramatic independent films Forty Shades of Blue (2005), Keep the Lights On (2012), Love Is Strange (2014), Little Men (2016), and Passages (2023). Early life Sachs was born in Memphis, Tennessee. His father grew up in Park City, Utah. Sachs frequently attended the Sundance Film Festival when it was titled, The U.S. Film Festival in the 1980s. In 1986 he spent a few months in Paris as a student. Sachs said he applied to University of Southern California, UCLA and NYU who all rejected him. He moved to New York City in 1988. Sachs stated, "The first thing I did in 1989 when I came to New York was worked as an assistant on a film called Longtime Companion by the director Norman Rene, which was about a group of New Yorkers who were confronted with, and confronting, living and dying through the AIDS crisis and it was a very seminal experience, I met a lot of filmmakers who were in the art department or assistants on that film. Kelly Reichardt and I became friends through that film, she was in the art department and I was in the…actually, I quit the art department and got a job as the assistant to the director, which Kelly Reichardt never let me forget.” Career