Peter Hujar’s Day is an intimate dive into a single day in the life of celebrated queer photographer Peter Hujar, directed by Ira Sachs (Passages, Love is Strange).
Anchored by a two-person cast, Ben Whishaw embodies Hujar in a quietly electrifying performance, while Rebecca Hall brings gentle poise as writer Linda Rosenkrantz. Together, they reconstruct a 1974 conversation that happened in Rosenkrantz’s Manhattan apartment, a conversation that’s now brought vividly to life onscreen.
Peter Hujar’s Day debuted at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, then screened in Panorama section at the 2025 Berlinale, and opens in U.S. cinemas on November 7, 2025.
Ira Sachs’s new film, Peter Hujar’s Day, stars Ben Wishaw and Rebecca Hall in a richly cinematic rendering of a conversation recorded in 1974 between photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz. Their talk that day focused on a single 24 hours in the life of Hujar, the brilliant and famously uncompromising artist who was one of the most important figures in downtown New York’s legendary cultural scene of the 70s and 80s. Set entirely in Linda’s Manhattan apartment, the film freely and imaginatively recreates that long-ago afternoon and the wonderfully discursive exchange between these two singular individuals. As the photographer vividly describes interactions with leading cultural figures of the day, including Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag, as well the challenges of living on limited financial resources in 70s New York, Peter Hujar’s Day transforms unexpectedly into a Bloomsday-like rumination on both an artist’s life and time itself.
Reflecting on the film, Sachs told Filmmaker Magazine, “I think the film and Ben’s performance gives voice and makes visible the want in an artist’s life. There’s so much desire that never gets sated and that is not in general visible to the world, right?”
See the official trailer above.
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