US indie director Sean Baker won a richly deserved Palme d’Or at the 77th Cannes Film Festival for “Anora”, a darkly comic and deeply moving Brooklyn odyssey about an erotic dancer who marries the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch, starring Mikey Madison.
Issued on:
3 min
Baker accepted the prize with Madison watching in the audience at the Cannes closing ceremony on Saturday. The win for “Anora” marks a new career high for the indie director, who built up a cult following with “Tangerine” (2015), “The Florida Project” (2017) and “Red Rocket” (2021).
“Anora” centres on Ani, a Brooklyn stripper turned call girl who strikes gold with a wealthy client, the son of a Russian oligarch, only for the fairy tale to turn sour. It was an instant favourite among film critics, drawing rave reviews in Cannes.
“This, literally, has been my singular goal as a filmmaker for the past 30 years, so I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with the rest of my life,” Baker joked, before adding that his ambition would remain to “fight to keep cinema alive”.
The 53-year-old director said the world needed reminding that “watching a film at home while scrolling through your phone, answering emails and half paying attention is just not the way, although some tech companies would like us to think so.”
He added: “So, I say the future of cinema is where it started: in a movie theater.”
Moments earlier, George Lucas received an honorary Palme d’Or from his old friend and sometimes collaborator Francis Ford Coppola, reuniting two of the most pivotal figures of the last half-century of American moviemaking.
India’s Payal Kapadia took the second-place Grand Prix for her sisterhood drama “All We Imagine as Light”. A poetic tale of love and loss, Kapadia’s film was the first Indian competition entry in a staggering 30 years. It follows a pair of small-town nurses who find themselves adrift in the sprawling metropolis of Mumbai.
The third-place Jury Prize went to France’s Jacques Audiard for his trans gangster musical “Emilia Pérez”. A thrilling Spanish-language debut for the veteran French helmer, with a preposterous pitch, it tells the story of a ruthless cartel boss who hires a lawyer to arrange his gender transition.
Special prize for Iran’s Rasoulof
The glorious cast of “Emilia Pérez” – which included Argentinian trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon, Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldana – also picked up a collective Best Female Actor award, while the male prize went to Jesse Plemons for his part in the absurdist triptych “Kinds of Kindness” by Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos.
Portugal’s Miguel Gomes won Best Director for his latest black-and-white reverie “Grand Tour”, a beguiling Asia-set travelogue tracing a low-level British diplomat as he flees his fiancé across a crumbling empire.
France’s Coralie Fargeat took Best Screenplay for her gleefully gory “The Substance”, which provided the shock of the festival. A thrilling and bloody body horror satire, it stars Demi Moore as an ageing and fading Hollywood star who undergoes a mysterious cloning procedure to avoid being axed by her callous producer.
There was a special award for Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, whose Cannes premiere just days after his hair-raising escape from Iran set the stage for an unprecedented showdown with the Islamic Republic, which had pressured him to withdraw his film and then sentenced him to jail.
Made underground in Iran on a shoestring budget, Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” traces the ethical dilemmas faced by an Iranian civil servant who is promoted to the role of regime investigator in the midst of a popular uprising.
