Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, acclaimed director Sean Baker’s new film follows Anora, a sex worker from Brooklyn, who gets her chance at a Cinderella story when she meets and marries the son of an oligarch.
Anora ‘Ani’ Mikheeva is a young stripper living in Brighton Beach, a Russian-speaking neighborhood in Brooklyn. As Ani is the only stripper in her upscale Manhattan strip club who speaks Russian, her boss introduces her to Ivan ‘Vanya’ Zakharov, the dissolute and immature son of wealthy Russian oligarch Nikolai Zakharov. Vanya is ostensibly in America to study, but prefers to party and play video games in his family’s Brooklyn mansion. His parents pay his godfather Toros and henchmen Garnick and Igor to keep an eye on him and clean up his messes.
Vanya hires Ani for several sexual encounters. He grows attached to her and pays her $15,000 to stay with him for a week and pose as his girlfriend, triggering a whirlwind romance. Vanya and his entourage fly to Las Vegas, where Vanya asks Ani to marry him. Although Ani is initially skeptical, Vanya insists his love is genuine, and they elope in a small Vegas wedding chapel.
After the wedding, Vanya offhandedly mentions that he hopes to use Ani to obtain a green card so that he will not have to go home and work for his inattentive father. Ani quits her job at the club and throws herself into the role of Vanya’s devoted wife.
Anora screens at Palace Byron Bay this week – palacecinemas.com.au.
