Intriguing movie about gay pioneer Peter Hujar starring Ben Wishaw lights up Berlin Film Festival

Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day is the kind of small, exacting film that makes a case for the power of restraint. Rather than attempting a full biography, Sachs stages a single afternoon — a December day in 1974 — and allows a recorded conversation between the photographer Peter Hujar and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz to become its script. Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall play Hujar and Rosenkrantz, respectively, inhabiting a single Manhattan apartment and, in doing so, conjuring an entire scene. According to production notes, the film reproduces Rosenkrantz’s transcription verbatim, and the result is less a life story than an intimate excavation of memory.

The project’s provenance is quiet and meticulous. Sachs worked from a transcript discovered in the Peter Hujar Archive at the Morgan Library & Museum to reconstruct the day; the production company describes the film as a one-room dramatisation of Hujar’s recollections about friends, lovers and colleagues. Janus Films, with Sideshow handling theatrical distribution in the United States, has slated a limited release for 7 November 2025, giving audiences a chance to sit with a film that trades plot for the texture of talk.

Festival reactions and early criticism have pointed to the film’s formal choices: long takes, a tactile 16mm look and an almost theatrical economy of setting. Reviewers observed that Sachs’s decision to keep the camera in the room — and to let Whishaw and Hall hold long conversational beats — creates the sensation of eavesdropping on a private ritual. The production notes and festival coverage place the picture squarely within Sachs’s quieter, character-led work; rather than grand revelation, the film offers accretion: small observations that accumulate into a portrait of a moment and a milieu.

Understanding why a day in Peter Hujar’s life can feel like an historical event requires a quick reckoning with the man himself. Born in New Jersey in 1934 and raised for a time by his Ukrainian grandparents, Hujar moved to New York as a teenager, studied at the School of Industrial Art, and slowly shifted from commercial work to a fiercely personal practice. He was present for the upheavals of late‑1960s New York and—through images and political work—became engaged with the early gay liberation movement. One of the items in the Morgan’s holdings is the poster image used to recruit for the Gay Liberation Front and for the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march; it sits in the archive as evidence of Hujar’s on‑the‑street activism as well as his studio practice.

Hujar’s photographic range is often recounted in contrasts: exquisitely composed black‑and‑white portraits on one hand and stark studies of mortality on the other. He photographed figures who would come to loom large in queer cultural memory — Marsha P. Johnson, the drag performer Divine, and the writer William S. Burroughs among them — and he also produced a sequence of images of corpses in Sicilian catacombs that later sat alongside portraits in a notorious exhibition titled Portraits in Life and Death. One of his better‑known images, the 1969 photograph published as “Orgasmic Man,” gained renewed visibility when it was chosen as the US cover for Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life; the choice reopened debates about the photograph’s ambiguous expression and the lines between eroticism and agony.

Hujar died in 1987 from complications related to AIDS, aged 53. His reputation grew significantly after his death: institutions such as the Morgan Library & Museum have mounted retrospectives and acquired major elements of his estate, and contemporary artists and collectors have continued to cite his influence. Sir Elton John, who curated an exhibition of Hujar’s work, praised the photographer’s ‘humanity, depth and sensual insights,” arguing that once the images enter a viewer’s memory “they are impossible to shake.’

Sachs’s film, by design, keeps the photographs at arm’s length. Viewers do not see Hujar’s images projected across a screen; instead, Whishaw’s Hujar recollects encounters with Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag and speaks, in fragments, of the practical humiliations and pleasures of being an artist who was often broke and always queered by circumstance. That constraint — the refusal to use the film as a slideshow of greatest hits — is part of the movie’s argument: that the lived networks and conversational life behind the pictures are themselves vital works of cultural history. Critics have characterised the result as a time capsule of downtown New York in the 1970s, one that makes memory a way of charting loss and community.

For audiences who know Hujar only through a single famous image, Sachs’s film offers an invitation to look more closely at a corpus that moves between tenderness and formal rigour. It also arrives at a moment when museums and archives are still reassembling histories of queer creativity and activism; the Morgan’s 2018 retrospective and the ongoing presence of the Hujar archive make clear that the work’s afterlife is as much institutional as it is intimate. Peter Hujar’s Day opens a conversation rather than closing one — and for viewers on 7 November 2025, it will be a prompt to seek out the photographs, the posters and the papers that remain the clearest traces of a life spent looking.

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Source: Noah Wire Services