‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ Starring Ben Winshaw as Famed Photographer Captures the Quiet Brilliance of an Ordinary Life | Trailer

Peter Hujar’s Day, directed by Ira Sachs, is a dramatic retelling of a day in the life of photographer Peter Hujar.

The film stars Ben Winshaw as Hujar alongside Rebecca Hall, who plays writer Linda Rosenkrantz. Set in the seventies, the story follows a conversation between the two as they discuss both the mundane and significant details of Hujar’s daily life as well as his art.

The film premiered back at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and later screened at New York Film Festival. Peter Hujar’s Day will open in US theaters starting on November 7 at Film Forum in New York.

Hujar was known for his black and white portraits which captured the raw emotion of his subjects back in the seventies and eighties. His photographs were celebrated for revealing a deep sense of vulnerability, establishing him as a distinctive and influential voice in photography.

He would photograph artists, writers, and members of New York’s downtown avant-garde scene. Hujar was well known for his cover the book, A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara.

The biopic covers a conversation between friends. Hujar and Rosenkrantz discuss all the events of what seems like an ordinary 24-hour period, but in doing so reveals deeper thoughts, anxieties, reflections, and connections to his life as an artist. The audience perceives life through the eyes of, what Variety describes, a “sweet, morose, gay, chain-smoking, furtively sincere, faraway-eyed Hujar, a veteran freelance photographer who was just coming into his own as a gallery artist and downtown scenester.”

Variety goes on to say, “It was a time when you could drift through a day and do something and simply have it be what it was. “Peter Hujar’s Day” is a vision of the ordinary that holds us because it contains a hidden glimmer of paradise.”

Watch the trailer for Peter Hujar’s Day above.