Film Icon James Ivory at Hudson Hall for a Day of Films and Merchant Ivory History

Image from "The City of Your Final Destination" (2009), Ivory's adaptation of Peter Cameron's novel about a graduate student who travels to Uruguay seeking permission to write a biography of a dead author, only to become entangled with the deceased's surviving family.

Saturday, August 29, 3pm and 6pm (conversation and signing at 5pm) | Hudson, NY

James Ivory (98) returns to Hudson Hall on August 29 for a single-day celebration of his decades-long creative partnership with the late screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the third pillar of the team behind Merchant Ivory Productions. Ivory is joined by Jhabvala's daughter Firoza Jhabvala and novelist Peter Cameron for a conversation marking the publication of "Disinheritance: The Rediscovered Stories," a 2025 collection of Jhabvala's fiction spanning the 1950s through the 1980s.

The day opens at 3pm with The City of Your Final Destination (2009), Ivory's adaptation of Peter Cameron's novel about a graduate student who travels to Uruguay seeking permission to write a biography of a dead author, only to become entangled with the deceased's surviving family. At 5pm, Ivory, Firoza Jhabvala, and Cameron sit down for a conversation and book signing. The day closes at 6pm with A Room with a View (1985), the Merchant Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster's novel that won Jhabvala one of her two Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay—the other came for Howards End in 1992.

Rural Intelligence spoke with Ivory ahead of a previous Hudson Hall celebration of his work, where he reflected on what's kept him going into his late nineties. "What keeps old people like me going is a basic thing, and that is curiosity," Ivory says. "That's the only thing. If you have that then you never stop."

Jhabvala, who died in 2013, met Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant at the outset of the trio's roughly 50-year filmmaking partnership, writing the screenplay for 22 of their productions along with one more completed after Merchant's death. Merchant once described the unlikely alchemy of the group: an Indian Muslim, a German Jew, and a Protestant American, "a three-headed god," or, he added, "maybe they should have called us a three-headed monster."

Disinheritance gathers stories Jhabvala published largely in The New Yorker across three decades, many drawing on her own life as a lifelong expatriate — born in Cologne, raised in England, and later based in both New Delhi and New York.

Floor seats for both films have sold out; a limited number of balcony seats were recently added. Tickets are $18 per film plus a $2 fee; the full-day pass is sold out.

Hudson Hall, 327 Warren Street, Hudson, NY. Remaining balcony tickets at hudsonhall.org.