©Courtesy of Neon
Neon has just released the trailer for Anora, a dramedy about a sex worker and her liaison with the son of a Russian oligarch. Directed by Sean Baker, the bilingual film won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it received an enthusiastic standing ovation that lasted for between seven and a half and ten minutes, depending on various sources.
Anora, played by Mikey Madison, plays the role of an Uzbek-American stripper living in Brooklyn who falls in love with Vanya, played by Mark Eidelshtein. Things get complicated when Vanya’s parents find out about their son’s dalliance.
Baker has directed a raft of award-winning films over the past twenty years including Take Out, Prince of Broadway, Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket. Tangerine, a film about two transgendered sex workers, was shot on a handful of iPhones. It premiered at Sundance in 2015. In 2017, he was named Best Director by the New York Film Critics Circle for The Florida Project.
Discussing his motivation for making Anora, Baker was quoted as saying that he likes to make films about sex workers to help “remove the stigma” around their activities. “If there is one intention with all of these films,” he added, “I would say it’s by telling human stories, by telling stories that are hopefully universal.”
Other cast members of Anora include Yuri Borisov, Darya Ekamasova, Alena Gurevich, Karren Karagulian, Luna Sofia Miranda, Lindsey Normington, Aleksei Serebryakov, and Vache Tovmasyan.
Anora will make its theatrical debut on October 18. Other soon-to-be-released films by Neon include Benoît Delhomme’s Mothers’ Instinct on July 26, Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo on August 9, and Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey—a Stephen King adaptation—on February 21, 2025. All three are in the horror/thriller category. Neon recently released Longlegs, a thriller about a serial killer starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage. Also by Osgood Perkins, Longlegs earned Neon $22 million in box-office receipts during its first weekend, setting a record for an independent horror film.
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