Ira Sachs and Cary Fukunaga Team Up To Bring '80s East Village AIDS Drama to TV
Thursday, August 4, 2016 at 8:21AM 
by Daniel Crooke
When mulling over Ira Sachs’ last handful of films – the intimately sketched, ephemeral epics of the heart, body, and soul, Keep The Lights On and Love is Strange, as well as his upcoming Little Men – a jokey poke from David Wain’s They Came Together immediately pops to mind: New York, a common setting between Sachs’ three aforementioned stories, “it’s almost like another character in the movie!”
After chronicling the city through a queer lens from the 1990s until now, Sachs will join forces with Cary Fukunaga to wind the clock back another decade to bring Christodora to the small screen – a interlocking character drama set in a 1980s East Village apartment building, built around devastation and communal connection in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Props to Sachs, for his New York stories always incorporate the city into the narrative in a way that isn’t only about iconographic lip service; his characters and their dilemmas could only exist within these urban surroundings, which creates deep internal and external senses of environmental exploration, whether through hard drugs, real estate, or gentrification.
Based on the novel of the same name, which was just released earlier this week, Christodora will be directed by Sachs and produced by Fukunaga via his production company, Parliament of Owls. [Side note: this company name in and of itself sounds like a creative collaboration between a lofty, Lincoln-mode Spielberg and Zack Snyder’s Ga-Hoole.] We don’t yet have a release date but fingers crossed that the limited series hits our televisions, tablets, very tiny screens, etcetera by 2017.
Have you picked up a copy of Christodora yet? What should we expect from Sachs’ first foray into television series?
Cary Fukunaga, Christodora, Ira Sachs, TV
Reader Comments (3)
Yes!!! I kind of liked Keep the Lights On, liked Love is Strange but absolutely adored Little Men. I think it was more an evolution of my appreciation for Sachs' movies as opposed to him getting better. The topic needs the sensitive, subtle, discerning eye of Ira Sachs.
Isn't the book supposed to be set in the same apartment building from the 1980s all the way thru the 2020s? It sounds like the scope is much bigger than just the AIDS crisis, although that will play an important role. Anyway Little Men is terrific, as has been everything of Sachs' I have seen, so count me in!
I guess the title refers to the Christodora House, a very iconic building from my childhood (and beyond) on the Lower East Side. Next door to my first elementary school, which also saw a lot of heavy change over the years.