Film Forum

“The best film in Sundance is just two people talking.” – Bilge Ebiri, Vulture. Ben Whishaw is pioneering queer photographer Peter Hujar and Rebecca Hall the author Linda Rosenkrantz (Talk) in a quintessential New York City film by Ira Sachs (LOVE IS STRANGE, PASSAGES). On December 18, 1974, Rosenkrantz asked her friend Hujar (1934-1987)—a leading figure of the downtown art scene in the 1970s—to write down everything he did that day, and the next day they met at her apartment. Based, verbatim, on a recently discovered transcript of their conversation—about a difficult shoot with Allen Ginsberg, a confusing visit from a Vogue editor, a call from Susan Sontag, financial and health worries—and set entirely in Rosenkrantz’s apartment, PETER HUJAR’S DAY vividly renders a unique and moving window on an evolving artist at a specific place and time.

Presented with support from The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Fund, The Helen Frankenthaler Endowed Fund for Films on Art, The R.G. Rifkind Endowment for Queer Cinema, and The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

2025     76 MIN.     USA     JANUS FILMS

Trailer

Reviews

CRITIC'S PICK. “A charming experiment that should delight those who like their pleasures both nostalgic and voyeuristic... Astoundingly detailed and wonderfully evocative... by turns languid, funny, tender and endearing... Beautifully performed and lovingly assembled... In its attention to the quotidian routines familiar to us all, the movie finds meaning in the mundane, showing how the most ordinary events—like, in Hujar's case, a phone call from Susan Sontag—can one day add up to an extraordinary life.”
– Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times

“SPECTACULAR. Ben Whishaw mesmerizes as an artist recounting 24 hours in 1970s New York City... Like the subject of his PETER HUJAR'S DAY, Ira Sachs is an artist whose work is defined by intense intimacy, and with his latest, he turns a seemingly routine conversation into a warm, compassionate, entrancing story that locates the momentous in the mundane... With Whishaw as a captivating figure of introspection and reserve, it turns a single conversation into the stuff of poignant drama.”
– Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“REMARKABLY INVENTIVE. A veristic and voluble delight, an exercise in eavesdropping on a pair of smart, funny people who wear posterity—there’s a tape recorder running, after all—with wry lightness. It’s also a lesson in graceful, imaginative filmmaking, as well as a showcase for coolly assured performances (from Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall) and a moving tribute to Hujar, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1987 at age 53.”
– Zachary Barnes, The Wall Street Journal

“Ingenious... Ben Whishaw plays Hujar, whose account of his life spotlights the piquant idiosyncrasies of Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, and other eminences.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Rich and full-bodied and intoxicatingly cinematic... one of the most descriptive evocations of the 1970s downtown art scene I’ve encountered since Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids.”
– David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“The modest sleeper hit … Takes an extended conversation between talented, creative friends and elevates it to the realm of both first-rate voyeurism and the second-hand high of reliving a lost era… The joy of PETER HUJAR’S DAY is the joy of being able to listen along.”
– David Fear, Rolling Stone

“A MASTERPIECE. Consisting of a conversation between two people in an East Village apartment, filmed austerely but evocatively, the picture revels in its spareness, its warm simplicity.”
– Bilge Ebiri, Vulture