One of our favorite movies of Sundance 2025 was a quiet and introspective two-hander from director Ira Sachs that plays more like a documentary than a biopic and even clocks in at a brisk 75 minutes. It’s “Peter Hujar’s Day,” and Janus Films has released the first trailer for the film ahead of its theatrical release this November.
Sachs’ film stars Ben Whishaw as photographer Peter Hujar and Rebecca Hall as journalist Linda Rosenkrantz, and though the film occurs entirely within Rosenkrantz’s apartment and is merely a long conversation between two friends, the film transports viewers back to 1974 New York City with this intimate and deeply personal peeling back of the curtain on the art scene of the day.
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Our critic Ryan Lattanzio admired the film’s minimalism, its craft, and its acting prowess, all while acknowledging that it is one of Sachs’ quietest and least commercial offerings. “The film is a lolling, ruminating afternoon bathed in sunlight and plaintive reflection as Peter vividly recalls interactions with names that will be familiar to you, like Susan Sontag, and other intellectuals and creators of the period. There’s a discursive ramble about ordering Chinese food that takes on a strange power,” he wrote.
What makes “Peter Hujar’s Day” unique is that the film’s dialogue is entirely drawn, word for word, from a transcript of a real-life conversation between Hujar and Rosenkrantz as part of a never-completed book. In it, Hujar recounts 24 hours in his life, bringing up interactions and encounters with other NYC luminaries like Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, and William S. Burroughs. The transcript itself was only unearthed in 2024, 50 years after Hujar and Rosenkrantz sat down together.
In speaking with IndieWire out of Sundance, Sachs discussed the challenges of making a literal conversation into cinema, specifically how to make the dialogue “suspenseful, emotional, not boring.”
“I connected to the time but also to the texture of intimacy between these two friends, which seemed to me dramatic unexpectedly and very intimate,” Sachs told IndieWire in January. “A connection that feels authentic between two people is what I look for in every scene that I shoot. This is a step forward because the language is so authentic, you feel like you’re already there. So then the enactment was actually very hard.”
After premiering at Sundance, the film was scooped up by Janus Films and then played the Berlin International Film Festival and will soon be part of the main slate at the New York Film Festival, where the movie should be right at home. It opens in theaters November 7.
Check out the first trailer for “Peter Hujar’s Day” below, along with the first poster for the film.
