Ira Sachs makes the kind of movies we love — intimate, small scale, character driven dramas. They aren’t the kind of movies that light up the multiplex, but they are the kind of you’ll think about for far longer than the latest high calorie blockbuster. Now, two years after his last effort, “Little Men,” the director is lining up faces old and new for an intriguing new project.
An array of film festival and arthouse faves including Isabelle Huppert, Jérémie Renier, Marisa Tomei, Greg Kinnear, and Aki Kaurismaki regular André Wilms have signed up for “A Family Vacation.” Co-written by Sachs and his regular collaborator Mauricio Zacharias, the story follows three generations of a family grappling with a life-changing experience during one day of a vacation in Sintra, Portugal, a historic town known for its dense gardens and fairy-tale villas and palaces.
That’s a synopsis as intriguing as the cast themselves. The picture will see Sachs reunite with Kinnear (“Little Men”) and Tomei (“Love is Strange”), but certainly having Huppert in the mix brings things to another for the director.
“I am working with some of my favorite actors in the world to tell this delicate story of a family in crisis,” he said in a statement (via Indiewire). “Some like Huppert for the first time, and others whom I have collaborated with for years. The script has a theatrical quality, in that nine lives unfold in the course of one day, and it’s wonderful to have such a nuanced, risk-taking group of actors to bring the story to life.”
Production on the film will kick off in October, and it’s one more to add to your radar for 2019.