Ira Sachs, Keep the Lights On, 2012, film
Held on 20, 21, 22, 23 Nov 2025
The International Festival of LGBTQIA+ Cinema in Madrid (QueerCineMad) and the Museo Reina Sofía come together to organise a retrospective on Ira Sachs (USA, 1965), a pivotal film-maker in contemporary queer cinema whose work has charted, across three decades, the affects, losses and resistance that traverse the lives of the LGBTQIA+ community. Sachs is the creator of a filmography which conceives of New York as the emotional architecture of his narratives, and as a space of memory, struggle and community. This programme includes the premiere of his most recent film, Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), in Madrid, with the film-maker in attendance in three of its sessions.
Sachs has filmed, with delicacy and conviction, the tensions between desire, precarity and belonging, from his first feature-length film, The Delta (1996), set on the margins of the Mississippi, to Love Is Strange (2014), where a gay couple have to give up their Manhattan apartment after marrying. In Keep the Lights On (2012) intimacy becomes a battleground in confronting addiction and neglect, while Lady (1994), a short film on the solitude of an elderly woman in New York, anticipates his sensibility for bodies made invisible. Last Address (2010) is a silent homage to queer artists who died from AIDS/HIV-related illnesses — Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz — whereby the façades of the buildings they lived in become intimate monuments, the remnants of history erased through windows. Thus, Ira Sachs’s body of work engages in a profound dialogue with film-makers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder in situating the gaze at the centre of bodies, in exploring the complexity of the struggle between himself and his films. Further, his practice reverberates through New Queer Cinema, a 1990s film movement that transformed the representation of sexuality from difference.
The director’s presence in Madrid, coupled with the premiere of his new work, makes this film season an event which extols both his career and his form of gazing and inhabiting the city from the queer, the community and the poetic. In these times of eviction and urban homogenisation, Sachs’s film-making reminds us that the neighbourhood can also be a gesture of care, a form of resistance, a future promise.
Organised by
QueerCineMad (The International Festival of LGBTQIA+ Cinema in Madrid) and Museo Reina Sofía
Accessible activity
This activity has two spaces reserved for people with reduced mobility
Agenda
jueves 20 nov 2025 a las 19:00
Session 1. Ira Sachs. The Delta and Lady
The Delta. USA, 1996, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 85’
Lady. USA, 1994, black and white, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 28’
“Coming out means to put your authenticity first, before another attempt at pleasing others”, states the leading character of The Delta, Ira Sachs’s debut feature on the double life of a white, middle-class teenager in the 1990s. The film explores the character’s inability to be himself on account of the guilt that stymies his desire — cruising is his way out of being repressed, the only route to finding his own small fiction, the place where he feels he belongs. Sachs employs the stage of desire in the early Gus Van Sant of Mala Noche (1986) and his contemporary Wong Kar-wai with Happy Together (1997). In Lady (1994), meanwhile, an anonymous woman in a red wig welcomes a team of documentary makers into her New York apartment; the team record her daily life as she argues with her boyfriend and gossips with her friend. The scenes alternate with black-and-white images of a woman with a red wig who escapes from suburban life.
viernes 21 nov 2025 a las 19:00
Sesión 2. Ira Sachs. Keep the Lights On
USA, 2012, colour, original version in English with Spanish, 101’
—With a presentation by and conversation with Ira Sachs. In this session, the festival, led by filmmaker Diego Céspedes, presents the honorary award to the director.
Keep the Lights On (2012), winner of the Teddy Award at Berlinale in the same year, is an unembellished depiction of a relationship between two men shaped by addiction, desire and emotional frailty. Set in New York in the early 2000s, the film follows Erik, a Danish documentary film-maker, and Paul, a lawyer with drug addiction issues, in a decade-long vortex of sexual encounters, rifts and reconciliations. Sachs films their intimacy with illuminated rawness, where the body is at once shelter and self-destruction. A vibrant and lonely New York bears witness to a generation looking for meaning in galleries, parties and shared rooms.
sábado 22 nov 2025 a las 19:00
Session 3. Ira Sachs. Love Is Strange
USA, 2014, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 86’
—With a presentation by and conversation with Ira Sachs
After almost four decades together, Ben and George are finally able to marry after same-sex marriage is legalised in New York. However, shortly after their wedding George loses his job as a teacher at a Catholic school, forcing the couple to sell their apartment and temporarily lead separate lives as they stay with family and friends. This new situation puts their love, dignity and relationships with others to the test. Love Is Strange is a delicate, moving reflection on love later in life, family and the fragile stability of urban life.
domingo 23 nov 2025 a las 12:00
Session 4. Ira Sachs. Last Address and Peter Hujar’s Day
Last Address. USA, 2009, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 8’
Peter Hujar’s Day. USA, Germany, UK and Spain, 2025, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 76’
—With a presentation by and conversation with Ira Sachs and David Velduque, a film-maker and host of the podcast Sabor a Queer (Queer Flavour). Premiere in Madrid
Last Address is a short film made for World AIDS Day, in which Ira Sachs shows the façades of the buildings where different New York artists such as David Wojnarowicz, Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar lived before they died from complications related to the virus. Peter Hujar’s Day, for its part, is a silent elegy which captures the final hours of the New York photographer’s life before he died from AIDS in 1987. Sachs films the hospital, the body, the wait, with a containment that is moving through its integrity. The film, both brief and devastating, becomes an expression of queer memory, a tribute to those whom art and history have left out of the frame. As in Keep the Lights On and The Delta, New York appears as the backdrop to intimacy, desire and loss, yet here the city is reduced to a room, to a body that is extinguished. AIDS, more than an illness, is a context, a collective wound, and Sachs addresses it as an ethics of care in film-making that looks not for responses, but presence. That transforms mourning into image and image into resistance.
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