New York, the late 1980s. Jimmy, a performance artist returning after a serious illness, resumes his career. As he prepares for the stage, he embarks on a new romance and pursues physical pleasure. Baroque religious music, old folk songs, standards, disco, and new wave—the breath of different eras flow together, while the scenes in which Jimmy gives extended renditions of The Man I Love and Look What They′ve Done to My Song, Ma stand out. For Jimmy, who waits for love and retraces his life through singing, the stage is a place where he can fully inhabit a song from beginning to end. Ira Sachs summons, through this fictional character, the memories of queer artists active in downtown New York during that era. Holding surging vitality and a seemingly fleeting fragility within the same body, Rami Malek turns Jimmy’s precarious presence into something mesmerizing.
Ira Sachs is a New York–based filmmaker. He made his feature debut with The Delta (1996), filmed in his hometown of Memphis. After winning the Sundance Film Festival′s U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize for Forty Shades of Blue (2005), he went on to direct Keep the Lights On (2012), Love Is Strange (2014), Little Men (2016), Frankie (2019), and Passages (2023), with his films invited to major festivals including Cannes, Sundance, and Berlin. His latest film, The Man I Love, is an official selection in the Competition section of the Cannes Film Festival.
From Busan International Film Festival 2026, No. 31
