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Operation Broken Silence

The Yida refugee camp sprawls as far as the eye can see, a tangle of makeshift huts made from the baked red clay of South Sudan, thatch roofs, and whatever bits of metal or plastic builders can salvage. Ten years ago, this was a pastoral village of 400, nestled between the Nuba Mountains in the north and the fertile wetlands of the White Nile in the south. Today, its inhabitants number more than 70,000 desperate people who have fled the warplanes of Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir.

Mark Hackett, a filmmaker and activist from Memphis, sits in a partially rebuilt church interviewing a Sudanese woman. The smell of charcoal fills the still air, as the woman struggles to describe the day militiamen from the north snuck into Yida and burned the church, which had been constructed by refugees displaced by al-Bashir’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Nuba Mountains.

“She was just crying,” recalls cinematographer Josh Boyd. “There was absolute silence in the church. In an area like that, where it was surprising how not-emotional people are, when people get emotional, it really gets you. They’ve seen so much, and they’ve lived so much, that when they finally do let go and cry … it’s not like how I cry when my ice cream falls off my cone.”

Hackett, Boyd, and three others have traveled halfway around the world to this obscure corner of Africa to film a feature-length follow-up to Hackett’s 2014 short documentary, Lost Generation of Sudan. “It’s about the consequences of conflict; about what it’s like to live in a refugee camp for five years, not knowing when you can get out,” Hackett says.

Mark Hackett speaks with education officials in the Yida Refugee Camp.

Sparks of Interest

“I got into filmmaking sort of accidentally,” Hackett says.

The Memphian says his worldview was shaped by his parent’s painful divorce when he was in sixth grade. By the time he got to Bartlett High School, he says, “I was a pretty jaded individual.”

During his senior year, a racially charged incident in the school led to Hackett being falsely accused of plotting violence. “I spent the night at Juvie, a 16-year-old, middle-class white kid. Not a lot of those down there,” he says. “The injustice I learned about there wasn’t about what was done to me. I met other kids down there — kids who were doing bad things because of the environment they were born into. They weren’t given a choice. Being down there changed the way I saw the world.”

In 2007, al-Bashir’s murderous campaign in the Darfur providence of Sudan commanded international attention. Hackett was attending the University of Memphis, intending to pursue a career as a chef. “There was a Sudanese speaker at U of M who talked about what was happening in his country. I thought it was the mother of all injustices. The Sudanese government was trying to wipe out entire ethnic groups that stood against the government’s vision for the country. Genocide is the crime to top all crimes. In Sudan, it’s been going on for over 25 years.”

Hackett dropped out of culinary school to devote himself to his new cause. He became acquainted with the community of Sudanese who had found refuge in Memphis and joined the Save Darfur Coalition.

“We were raising awareness and pushing some U.S. and international policies towards Sudan in hopes of making things better.”

He and his colleagues traveled the country, speaking to churches, schools, civic organizations — “pretty much anyone who would listen” — urging people to get involved. “There was a lot of empathy. Memphis was a unique place to do a lot of this advocacy work, because there are a lot of Sudanese people here.”

Failed State

Back in Africa, the slow-rolling humanitarian disaster dragged on. In 2011, the stalemated conflict officially ended when South Sudan became an independent country. But hope for a brighter future ended quickly, as an al-Bashir-backed insurgency threatened to tear the nascent country apart. The Nuba Mountains, whose inhabitants included a half-million Christians and a roughly equal population of moderate Muslims and those who follow the area’s traditional shamanistic religions, had sided with the South but ended up on the north side of the border. Al-Bashir’s army regrouped to push the infidels out of the country, but the Nuba were ready. When military victory proved impossible, al-Bashir resorted to what Hackett calls “genocide by attrition. If you can’t kill the people, you take away their means to live.”

Villages were bombed to rubble, wells poisoned, crops burned, livestock slaughtered. Sudanese regulars and Islamist militias engaged in systematic mass rape. “People were pulled from their homes, shot in the streets, burned alive. If you were an ethnically black Nuba, you had a target on your back.”

Nuba refugees streamed to the relative safety of Yiba. The situation was grim, but the people were hopeful. “They’re the only group in Sudan who have been able to stand up to the government and survive,” Hackett says. “The longer this conflict drags out, that hope is going to disappear.”

Ground Truth

The 2008 financial crisis, the election of Barack Obama, and the fallout from the failed Iraq War diverted media attention from the intractable war in Sudan. But to Hackett, and thousands of other refugees and international activists, the continuing horrors in Sudan were unacceptable. They searched for new, long-term solutions. “Could the U.S. go in and get involved on the ground and make things temporarily better? Yeah. But the minute we leave, it’s going to get a lot worse, because there’s no mechanism in place to hand over to the Sudanese.”

Hackett formed a new nonprofit, which he dubbed Operation Broken Silence. “We do emergency relief work, community leadership training, some other things,” he says. “But education is our primary focus, because if there’s a silver bullet, that’s it. Right now, in just the Yida refugee camp alone, there are over 30,000 kids without a classroom — a total generation missing out on their future. If those kids can be educated, there will be a window of opportunity in the future when the dictatorship falls. Dictatorships are not sustainable, by their very nature. When that window appears, those kids will have an opportunity. If they don’t have any education, they will never have that chance.”

In 2012, Hackett organized his first trip to South Sudan. “It was the most terrifying, exhilarating, emotionally draining trip. If there was one thing that surprised me, it was the people I met there. I thought I would be meeting people who were just completely shell-shocked and didn’t know how to move forward with their lives. I found the exact opposite. Everyone from rebel commanders to ordinary members of the community had ideas about how to fix Sudan. They welcomed us with open arms. They were very willing to tell their story. … I thought I would find victims, but instead I found survivors. Tough people who were actually pushing forward with solutions.

“Rather than just visiting the refugee camps, we decided to cross the border and go to one of the conflict areas. I took a camera on that trip, just to take pictures and document things. We did a lot of interviews when we were there. We weren’t planning on making a film, but we came back and thought, ‘Hey, we have all of these great interviews and footage of communities being bombed.’ So we put that together into our first film.”

Across the Frontlines was made with the help of filmmaker Josh Boyd. “I’ve known Mark Hackett since I was 10 or 11,” Boyd says. “Operation Broken Silence is close to his heart, and it’s hard not to latch onto something like that when you’re close.”

Photographer Jacob Geyer shows a group of children their photograph

The shoestring documentary was an unlikely success. “I was absolutely stunned at how it was received,” Hackett says. “International Studies professors wanted to show it to their students. Churches wanted to screen it. Once people could actually see what was happening, people were more likely to make donations or call their Congressman and tell them to support this or that bill. I discovered that not only was this the key to getting and keeping people involved, but that we could actually have a real impact on the ground. If we can do this bigger and better, we can do everything else bigger and better. Visual storytelling makes explaining what we’re trying to do easier … As opposed to us being the story, we become the microphone to let the Sudanese tell their own story.”

Lost Generation

In 2014, Hackett asked Boyd to accompany him to Africa for the follow-up to Across the Frontlines. Boyd says he was excited to go, but wandering into an active war zone gave him pause. “We wanted to instill a message of hope, because it’s all about these kids. They fear for their lives every day, so we can suck it up for two weeks to show that they’re still smiling.”

Once in the South Sudanese capital of Juba, however, things didn’t go as planned. Canceled flights ate up valuable time. “South Sudan has very few drivable roads. If you want to travel somewhere in the country, you pretty much have to fly.”

Finally, a Nuba leader gave them a tip. “He told us that a couple of hours south of there was a refugee camp. They’re all from the Nuba Mountains, and about 70 percent of them are kids under the age of 16.”

Operation Broken Silence arrived in the camp before the U.N. and witnessed unthinkable suffering. “We met moms who were looking after 20 or 30 kids. Most of the kids were orphaned or didn’t know where their parents were. No classrooms at all. That was when we realized how big the education crisis was. And that was one of the smaller camps, but there were so many kids there. So that’s when we figured out what the film was about. Anyone who knows anything about Sudan knows that the Sudanese government has committed serial genocide. We all agree this is not a good government. Maybe we need to quit talking about that and look at how that is impacting ordinary people in Sudan.”

Lost Generation of Sudan screened at Indie Memphis last fall. “Lost Generation was a very specific film with a very specific call to action,” Hackett says.

It proved to be a powerful fund-raising tool for Operation Broken Silence. “We make these films to fund-raise so we can provide education tools and pay the teachers,” Boyd says. “We’re trying to solve the problem. We’re not just raising money so we can make another film.”

Return to Yida

“Yida is sort of a microcosm of what’s wrong with Sudan right now,” Hackett says. “No schools, people who don’t have jobs, people displaced by the conflict. We wanted to go to Yida to get eyewitness interviews about what’s happening. But it’s also where most of our classrooms are. In Yida alone, it’s estimated that there are 20,000 to 25,000 kids. We’ve only put 700 of those kids back into a classroom.”

The teachers Operation Broken Silence supports are all local. “Before the war started, there were about 200 schools in the Nuba Mountains. Now there are fewer than 100, and none of them are functioning anywhere close to capacity. The schools that were destroyed, almost all of the teachers escaped, alongside the kids. They’re the only ones who understand the cultural context, and they understand what these kids have been through, because they’ve been through it, too. They’re better than any teacher we could bring in.”

Director of photography Josh Boyd photographs children in South Sudan

Cameramen Jay Geyer and grip Aaron Baggett rounded out the film crew. Photographer Katie Barber came along to capture stills. Barber, a wedding and portrait photographer, says her husband encouraged her to go, because he knew she wanted to “take pictures that matter, pictures that will make people think of the world differently.”

Operation Broken Silence departed for Africa in late May. After 30 hours of travel, the team landed in Juba, where Barber got her first exposure to the chaos of the South Sudanese capital. “No one wears uniforms, and everyone is yelling at you in Arabic,” she says. “I’m the only woman, so everyone is staring and pointing at me. I was jet-lagged and terrified.”

After a day to get their bearings in Juba, the team flew to the Yida refugee camp in an aging, single-engined Russian transport dating from the Soviet era that was so hopelessly overloaded Geyer had to sit on a stool in the aisle. “That was the first time I saw Mark worried,” Barber says. “He’s a very even-keeled person. It was like being in a tin bucket hurtling through the air. I’ve never been so happy to be in a refugee camp in my life.”

Once in Yida, Hackett contacted local elders and camp officials to get permission to film, but every day was fraught with risk. “When you’re walking around a refugee camp with cameras, and you’re the only white people there, you stand out. Soldiers tend to get antsy when strange people start taking pictures of them,” Hackett says.

“We wanted to know what it was like on a normal Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in Yida,” Boyd says. “When you wake up, where do you go? What do you do? We were talking to this one guy who was building a house. He was putting out clay bricks to bake in the sun. We asked him how long he thought it would take to build it. He said he thought about a year. The people there, yes, they’re seeking refuge, but they’re also making a life. That’s what we wanted to show.”

The team filmed in the 100-degree heat from sunup to sundown for five days. Early in the shoot, they visited the school Operation Broken Silence is funding. “The students knew we were coming,” Barber says. “Their teachers brought them out, and they stood in a giant square and sang to us. They sang how we are the people of Sudan, the children of Sudan. Thank you for coming, thank you for being here. That was the only moment on the trip where I lost it. I was trying to take pictures, but I couldn’t see. I think I was just surprised that they were so happy that someone was listening to them, that somebody actually cared. They don’t think anyone cares.”

Keeping Hope Alive

After battling heat exhaustion and waterborne illness (“I know how to get to the pharmacy in Juba now,” Boyd says.) the team returned with a terabyte of audio and video and more than 4,000 still images. Hackett and Boyd are editing the raw material into a feature-length documentary, tentatively titled Yida.

After eight years of immersion in the problems of Sudan, Hackett says his commitment has only intensified. “It’s the Sudanese people. They’ve been through so much. Things have happened in Sudan that make the things happening in Syria look like a walk in the park. A lot of the stuff the Islamic State is doing, the Sudanese government perfected those tactics decades ago. And the Sudanese have been going through this for almost three decades now, and they’re still some of the most genuine and driven people you’ll ever meet. They haven’t given up on their country.

“The refugees who came over to Memphis in the early 2000s — a lot of them would love to return home one day if things got better. Once you’ve met them, heard their stories, it’s impossible to turn your back on them.”

[slideshow-1]

To learn more about how you can help, visit OperationBrokenSilence.org.

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The Strange Road to “Love Is Strange”

It’s January 30, 2005, in Park City, Utah, the last day of the Sundance Film Festival, and the greatest single day in Memphis film history. Craig Brewer, having just accepted the Audience Award for Hustle & Flow, has retuned to his seat just in time to hear the winner of the Jury Award announced: 40 Shades of Blue, directed by Ira Sachs.

“When they announced Ira, I embarrassed myself. I let out this scream, and I leapt off of my seat,” Brewer recalls. “I couldn’t believe it. Two Memphis filmmakers, with two Memphis films, just took the two top prizes at Sundance.”

It wasn’t Sachs’ first Sundance. In 1997, The Delta, his coming-of-age story of a gay teen in Memphis, had screened at the festival to great acclaim. But the indie film business being what it is, it took him eight years to get back to Sundance, coincidentally the same year as Brewer, his friend and fellow Memphian.

“Out of all of the filmmakers I know, he’s my hero,” Brewer says. “He’s held to his style through a challenging time in independent cinema. The individual auteur is not rewarded in this global marketplace.”

* * *

It’s 10 a.m. on August 22, 2014. Ira Sachs sits in his Greenwich Village apartment as the first commercial screening of his new film Love Is Strange is happening in New York City. “It feels great,” he says. “It’s been a long road to get here, but now it’s in other people’s hands. It’s with the audience.”

Sachs’ new film has been gathering buzz on the festival circuit ever since its debut at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, where Memphis filmmaker Morgan Jon Fox was in the audience “I saw about 10 to 12 movies that were incredible, but only one of them got a standing ovation, and that was Love Is Strange,” he says. “As a director trying to make movies about queer culture, Love Is Strange is one of the most important and affecting films I have ever seen.”

Sachs has been gently deflecting this kind of hyperbolic praise for his film for the past nine months. “Real personal reactions to this movie are what I was hoping for, and what I am seeing,” he says. “I think people go into it expecting one thing, but then they find that it’s a portrait of a family, and in that way it is a portrait of all of our lives. It’s very much about the different stages of life we go through and how love looks differently in each one. I feel very differently about the possibilities of love as a middle-aged person than I did when I was 20.”

* * *

Like Brewer, Sachs’ Sundance win resulted in the opportunity to work with a much bigger budget. Sach’s 2007 film, Married Life, was a finely crafted, 1940s period piece starring Chris Cooper, Rachel McAdams, and Pierce Brosnan. It cost $12 million to make, but earned less than $3 million at the box office.

“I had to reinvent myself,” Sachs says. “You have to keep assessing what is possible and recalibrating your strategy about how to keep going.”

Sachs’ 2012 film, Keep the Lights On, couldn’t have been more different. It was an abandonment of the Hitchcockian style Sachs toyed with in Married Life and a return to his indie roots. The raw, unflinching story of a doomed love between a filmmaker and a drug addict spiraling out of control was as harrowing a bit of autobiography as has ever hit a screen.

“Each film is really an expression of where I am at that moment in my life,” Sachs says. “The movie is somehow a way to translate that into a story. I began working on Love Is Strange in January 2012, with my co-writer Mauricio Zacharias. That was a point when I went from living alone in my New York apartment to living with my husband, our two babies, their mom, and occasionally visiting in-laws. So the idea of a multi-generational family story told inside a cramped New York apartment seemed like a good idea.”

* * *

Alfred Molina first heard of Love Is Strange when his agent gave him the script. The 61-year-old actor, whose big break came playing Indiana Jones’ ill-fated guide in the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, has been in comedies and dramas, films large and small. But he knew this little $1.5 million film was going to be something special.

“It’s a story about how love survives,” he says. “Anyone who is in love, or anyone who has fallen in love, regardless of who or how, can relate to that.”

The story opens with George (Molina) and Ben (John Lithgow), a couple whose easy rapport speaks of a long and fulfilling relationship, getting ready in the morning. After decades together, it’s a day neither thought they would ever see: Their wedding day.

“The refreshing thing from an audience’s point of view is that whenever you see love stories, it’s almost always at the younger end of the age spectrum,” Molina says. “It’s couples struggling to find themselves, to find each other, to find their place in the world. But these characters are in the autumn of their years, and after many, many years of a committed relationship, they suddenly find themselves in crisis.”

George is a music teacher at a Manhattan Catholic high school. His homosexuality has been an “open secret” for years, but now that he and Ben, a 71 year old who has retired to his painting, have made it official, his boss can no longer shield him from the diocese, and he is unceremoniously fired.

In the hands of another writer/director, that would be the story: a gay couple, finally granted their right to wed, continues their fight against the forces of intolerance and discrimination. There would be protests and perhaps a climactic court scene with George and Ben giving stirring speeches about tolerance and acceptance, ending with a favorable verdict and applause. But that’s not Love Is Strange.

“In real life, people don’t have those big scenes,” says Molina. “You never have those cathartic moments where you let everything out and you make a great speech that encompasses your life. That’s why Ira’s so brilliant, because he’s not afraid to be truthful about it.”

Sachs says he takes inspiration from Italian Neo-Realist filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni. Working in postwar Italy with very few resources, Antonioni’s films concentrated on the mundane details that would be cut from a Hollywood production in favor of sweeping but artificially heightened drama. “We have very dramatic lives without necessitating melodrama,” Sachs says. “The things that happen to us in the course of our lives are major, even if they’re described in a minor key.”

Without George’s income to support them, the couple is forced to sell their apartment and separate. Ben moves in with his nephew Eliot (Darren E. Burrows) and his wife Kate (Marisa Tomei), sleeping on the bottom bunk bed in his great nephew Joey’s (Charlie Tahan) room. George crashes with some friends, a pair of gay policemen who love to play Dungeons and Dragons and throw parties.

“He uses the injustice as a device to explore the human condition in other areas,” Brewer says. “Love Is Strange is probably Ira’s most subversive film because it’s so accessible. It moves you on a human level, and doesn’t hit you over the head with politics. That’s what makes it so compelling. In a way, it quickly stops being a movie that explores gay issues and becomes a movie about old love and commitment, and especially about what some people are having to face in this current economy.”

After reading the script, Molina was the first actor to sign on to the project. “It went through all of the usual vicissitudes and stumbles along the way that independent film is subject to,” he says. “But I stayed with it because I liked the script so much.”

* * *

Sachs says the character Ben was inspired by Memphis artist Ted Rust. “Ted was my great uncle Ben Goodman’s partner for about 45 years. I had the opportunity to really get to know him well. He’s a guy who, at 98, began his last sculpture, which was of a young teenager with a backpack on. At 99, he died, and the piece remained unfinished. But to me, the idea of a man pursuing his passion and creativity until the last minute seemed extraordinary.”

In Love Is Strange, Ben finds solace in his painting, even as the life he has built with George crumbles around him. “It’s about the uncompleted sense of possibilities that an artist, or any of us, can have. It’s something we can strive for,” Sachs says.

As Sachs struggled to raise money for his film, he managed to land a great cast. Tomei signed on for the important role of Kate, a writer whose long-suffering kindness is tested when Ben moves in. For Ben, Sachs landed the legendary Lithgow. “I brought Lithgow in, with the approval and encouragement of Molina,” the director says. “They had been friends for 20 years in the same social circle in Los Angeles. Once we started working, they were like kids who met at summer camp who had been reunited. They had so much history to talk about, and so much common life between them.”

Once on set, the chemistry between the two lead actors was effortlessly real. “I think the fact that we’ve been friends for so long certainly helped,” Molina says. “We didn’t have to spend any time creating a shorthand. We made each other laugh a lot.”

Sach’s on-set technique is unusual. The actors come to the set with their lines memorized, the scene is blocked out, and the cameras roll. “Everything is emotionally improvised,” Sachs says. “The text is there, and they stick to it, but we’ve never rehearsed before we start shooting, and they’ve never heard another actor say a line. It’s a strategy I’ve worked with ever since the days of 40 Shades of Blue. Film is really about the filming of what’s happening in a moment, and it doesn’t need to be repeated. I find that you get the most spontaneous performances when you don’t talk too much before hand.”

From the beginning of his career, actors have responded enthusiastically to Sachs’ direction. “He creates a very pleasant, very respectful atmosphere on a set,” says Molina. “He’s not a shouter. He’s not standing behind a video screen screaming ‘Do it again!’ He’s very quiet and unobtrusive.”

If, like most people, your image of Molina is of Doctor Octopus in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and your image of Lithgow is the manic alien invader from Third Rock from the Sun, you’re in for a shock. Molina’s George is the breadwinner, quietly struggling through repeated indignity to find a place where they can recreate their lives, until one wrenching scene where he shows up on Eliot’s and Kate’s door to cry into Ben’s arms. Lithgow’s Ben is kind, centered, and empathetic, but his immersion in his art makes him myopic. Together, they’re beautiful, inspiring, and heartbreakingly real.

“I have yet to see a performance this year that bests either Molina or Lithgow,” says Brewer.

* * *

Sachs’ first movie was a short called Vaudeville, about a group of traveling performers. “All of my films have been about friendships, but in the context of community,” he says. “To me, you can’t separate the two.”

Love Is Strange

Love Is Strange‘s New York setting provided many natural details. George’s hard-partying cop friends are inspired by a couple who were living upstairs from Boris Torres, Sachs’ husband, when they first met. “This kind of Tales of the City communal living is very wonderful and how we get by in our lives,” Sachs says. “The most important thing to me in New York is the relationship and the family I create for myself — both the biological family and otherwise.”

Sachs says Memphis’ contribution was more subtle, and more profound. “Memphis is a real inspiration. You think about the great music and art that’s come out of that town. What’s more entertaining than the Staple Singers or Isaac Hayes? But they have emotional depth. Jim Dickinson is a perfect example. He’s like Falstaff. He’s a perfect mix of drama and comedy.”

Love Is Strange is a dramatic film structured like a comedy, starring three actors with impressive comedic chops. Sachs compares it to 1930s comedies of remarriage, such as It Happened One Night, where a separated couple struggles to reunite. “It’s the structure of the Shakespearian comedy. I felt really fortunate to work with these extraordinary comic actors in the movie. It is a dramatic film, but there is a lot of lightness, because of the genius timing and effortlessness of actors like Marisa Tomei and John Lithgow. They brought a little levity to serious situations.”

Lithgow and Tomei are two actors who, like the late Robin Williams, can swing easily between comedy and drama. “I think it’s their timing, and I think it’s very lifelike to bring humor into a situation. It’s one of the shades of experience. It’s also pleasurable. This is maybe the most entertaining movie that I’ve made. That doesn’t mean it’s less deep, it just means people have an easier relationship with it. They’re happy to be there.”

* * *

Where Sachs’ Keep the Lights On was a sexually explicit film of passionate love gone bad, Love Is Strange is a meditation on long-term love, with nothing more sexual than a cuddle in a bunk bed between two fully clothed old men. And yet, somehow, both films have the same rating from the MPAA: R. Why? Is the mere fact that the lead characters are gay enough to earn an R rating in 2014?

“It’s totally unjustified,” says Morgan Jon Fox. “It’s a sham. It’s absurd that there are films that are far more violent or that have content that is far more detrimental that do not have an R rating.”

Brewer first saw the film before it was rated at the Los Angeles Film Festival. “I didn’t know it was going to be an R. What is the cause for the R rating? There’s nothing in that movie that is vulgar.”

Still of Charlie Tahan, Darren E. Burrows, and John Lithgow in Love Is Strange

Sachs is puzzled by the inappropriate rating, but remains, as always, unflappable.”It doesn’t upset me, except for the fact that this is a film about family, and it seems like it’s shutting off people who would get a lot from it. For better or worse, it’s a family film.”

Fox is more blunt in his assessment of the politics surrounding the rating. “To see two adults who are happy, who have been in a relationship forever, these are the kinds of role models that young queer kids need. But it’s so clear what they’re warning parents about, and that’s love. Warning: Your child may be influenced by love.”

* * *

“We’ve had terrific feedback,” Molina says. “The response from critics has been very positive, and audiences have loved it. I think it proves very clearly that there’s an audience out there for movies that are a bit more sensitive, a bit more challenging. It’s been very gratifying to see how people have responded to it.”

When Love Is Strange comes to Memphis for a premiere with the director on Friday, September 26th, it does so with the wind at its back. It’s currently sitting at 98 percent positive reviews on the film critic aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes; its $1.5 million budget was paid back with foreign rights sales at the Berlin Film Festival before it had even opened in America; and it has been very successful in limited release.

But it is the film’s message of love that Sachs says he wants his own two toddlers, Viva and Felix (“‘Life’ and ‘Happiness’, which they are.”), to take with them in life. “I was in Memphis a few weeks ago, and on Saturday I said, ‘Let’s have a potluck’, and on Sunday I had 10 pies and four batches of fried chicken. That’s love.”

And not at all strange.

Love Is Strange premieres Friday, September 26th at Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill. Ira Sachs will be in attendance for a Q&A.