Weekend

Andrew Haigh's Weekend (2011) was the breakthrough that established the British director as a major voice in intimate, naturalistic drama, a standing he later confirmed with 45 Years and All of Us Strangers. It was made on a modest budget and premiered at South by Southwest, where it won the audience award, and it became one of the most acclaimed queer films of its era.

Tom Cullen and Chris New play the two men whose chance hook-up grows, over forty-eight hours, into a connection charged with the knowledge of its time limit. Haigh shoots in long, unhurried takes and a muted, lived-in palette, and he lets the relationship unfold through conversation, about love, identity, art and the closet, with very little in the way of incident. Watching it feels close to eavesdropping on a real romance as it rapidly intensifies.

Critics praised its honesty and emotional precision when it came out, and it has since been recognised as a landmark of contemporary gay cinema, admired for giving its central relationship the same weight any great screen romance receives. Tender and talkative, Weekend finds the universal in the specific. It announced a film-maker with a rare gift for the texture of intimacy and the ache of impermanence, a gift he would carry into 45 Years and All of Us Strangers.