Rami Malek In Ira Sachs’ Latest ‘The Man I Love’ — First Look Clip 

EXCLUSIVE: Ira Sachs is back at Cannes this year with The Man I Love, his third film in three years, and it stars Rami Malek. Check out a clip from the film, which debuts on Wednesday in Cannes. 

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 alongside Malek are 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.  

“It’s about the last several months of Van Gogh’s life when his death was imminent,” Sachs said of Pialat’s film in his director’s note. “But in that period, he lived and chose to live with such commitment to the creation of art, as well as the experience of pleasure. That was the kind of film Mauricio and I decided to write: one in which death is present, but in actuality, nobody actively dies; they actively live. What the film needed to be was the abundance, not the disappearance.”

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. 

Check out the clip from The Man I Love above. 

mk2 is handling sales on the title. Cannes runs until May 23.