The forty-year-old photographer Peter is a top dog in New York art circles and the bohemian scene. He knows Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, Allen Ginsberg – and finds the time right after breakfast to give his opinion on his acquaintance, model Lauren Hutton, and her photoshoot for Elle. Mannered, candid, methodical, but above all, infectiously nonchalant. In his East Village flat, he meets his friend Linda, who interviews him about the events of the last 24 hours. Their conversation becomes a memory exercise – an intimate confession and an elegy to a lost era, documented through Peter’s photographs. He lights a cigarette. The body knows, the camera reveals, and a journey through time begins.

Sachs is the quietest master of American independent film, and every couple of years he finds a clever way to challenge the viewer. Premiered at the Berlinale, this piece is based on a 1974 conversation between writer Linda Rosenkrantz and the black-and-white photography grand master Peter Hujar (1934–1978). Only a transcript of the conversation survives. Sachs reimagines it freely with actors Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, offering a feast for those who crave conversations on the banality, ache and prose of art, reminiscent of lines by Proust and Joyce. Hujar, one of the key figures in the New York art scene of the 1970s and ’80s – who “hung up on every important photography dealer in the Western world” – gravitated toward unvarnished portraits, urban landscapes, and more marginal subjects and moments. He lived in poverty but was posthumously mythologised as a cult artist. His close friend Lebowitz once said of him: “His personal glamour consorts so awkwardly with his artistic discipline that trying to keep both in mind at once can hurt your brain.”