Filmmaker Ira Sachs has spoken out against the Motion Picture Association’s NC-17 rating of his Sundance film “Passages,” slamming the ratings board as “anti-progress” and saying that he will not recut his film to earn an R rating and will instead release the film unrated with distributor MUBI.
“There’s no untangling the film from what it is,” Sachs told The Los Angeles Times. “It is a film that is very open about the place of sexual experience in our lives. And to shift that now would be to create a very different movie.”
“Passages,” which premiered at Sundance this year, follows a same-sex couple, Tomas and Martin (Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw), whose relationship is upended when Tomas has an affair with a woman named Agathe (Adèle Exarchapoulos).