Ira Sachs on Peter Hujar’s Day and New York in the 1970s
November 7, 2025
We’re excited to continue FLC Luminaries, our video series that spotlights talent at all levels of the filmmaking process who uplift the art and craft of cinema. The latest episode features director Ira Sachs discussing his latest film, Peter Hujar’s Day, an NYFF63 Main Slate selection.
Peter Hujar’s Day is now playing at FLC, on 35mm through November 13 only—get tickets!
The photographer Peter Hujar, whose images exist in an important lineage and dialogue with the work of groundbreaking gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz, forms the center of the latest movie by fearless independent American filmmaker Ira Sachs (Passages). Based on rediscovered transcripts from an unused 1974 interview by nonfiction writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall), in which she asked Hujar (Ben Whishaw) to narrate the events of the previous day in minute detail, Sachs’s film is a mesmerizing time warp, an illustration of the life of the creative mind, the quotidian and the imaginative at once, fully and lovingly inhabited by its two brilliant actors. With this engrossing and wholly unexpected film, Sachs shuttles us back to a specific moment in New York queer cultural history and a still-influential art scene that lives on in words as much as images. A Janus Films release.