FIlmmaker Ira Sachs is headed back to Sundance. Sachs, a native Memphian and Central High graduate who lives in New York wrote and directed Forty Shades of Blue, the festival’s 2005 Grand Jury Prize winner. He returns to Park City with Keep the Lights On, a just-completed drama about a long-term relationship between two men that’s rocked by secrets and addiction.
Though shot in New York Keep the Lights On is tangentially related to Forty Shades as it’s a fictionalized account of events in the filmmaker’s life that occurred while he was in Memphis shooting the film.
111 feature films were selected from more than 4000 submissions to screen at Sundance, 2012. Keep the Lights On It’s is one of 16 films selected in the U.S. dramatic feature category.
Memphians Adam Hohenberg (also a producer of Forty Shades of Blue) and Iddo Patt are among the producers.
“The film is about relationships as they actually are with all their complexities and contradictions, instead of how they are usually depicted in most mainstream Hollywood movies,” says Hohenberg who hopes the film will premiere in Memphis next fall.