On 25 May 2024, Sean Baker’s Anora was awarded the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, capping a festival year defined by political films and a hard-fought contest among more than twenty contenders. Baker, the chronicler of America’s working poor and its margins, had made his most commercially ambitious film yet.
Anora tells the story of a Brooklyn exotic dancer who marries the impulsive son of a Russian oligarch, only to see the union tested by his family’s enforcers. It mixed the screwball energy of classic Hollywood comedy with Baker’s trademark empathy and cinema-verité naturalism, and its star, Mikey Madison, became an instant Oscar front-runner.
The win was a landmark for the independent film world: a movie made for under $6 million, from a director who had spent two decades shooting on the streets of America, taking the highest honour in world cinema. It set the stage for a triumphant awards season, in which Anora would go on to sweep critics’ prizes and, eventually, take the Academy Award for Best Picture.