NEON Releases First Trailer for Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or Winner ‘Anora’ Featuring a Star is Born Turn From Mikey Madison
NEON has dropped the first (red band) trailer for Sean Baker’s Anora, the reigning Palme d’Or winner from this summer’s Cannes Film Festival.
Mikey Madison (Scream) stars as Ani, a young sex worker from Brooklyn who gets her chance at a Cinderella story when she meets and impulsively marries Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of an oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, her fairytale is threatened as the parents set out for New York to get the marriage annulled.
In her Cannes review of the film, AW’s Savina Petkova says “Madison’s magnetism seems endless and her soft voice can allure anyone into doing anything, really.” The eighth feature film by Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Red Rocket) “is a boisterous comedy of errors, where a girl really tries to own that Cinderella story.”
The film’s Cannes win marked five Palmes in a row for distributor NEON, a hot streak that started with 2019’s Parasite from Bong Joon Ho (which went on to win Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars), 2021’s Titane from Julia Ducournau, 2022’s Triangle of Sadness from Ruben Östlund (nominated for Best Picture and Best Director) and 2023’s Anatomy of a Fall (nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress and winner of Best Original Screenplay).
“[Anora] was something we collectively felt we were transported by, we were moved by,” said Greta Gerwig, who served as president of this year’s jury. “It felt both new and in conversation with older forms of cinema. There was something about it that reminded us of [the] classic structures of [Ernst] Lubitsch or Howard Hawks, and then it did something completely truthful and unexpected.”
“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,” said Baker upon winning the Palme d’Or. “I do know I will continue to fight for cinema, because right now as filmmakers we need to fight to keep cinema alive… Watching films with others in a movie theater is one of the great communal experiences — we share laughter, sorrow, anger, fear, and hopefully have a catharsis with our friends and strangers. And that’s sacred. So, I say the future of cinema is where it started: in a movie theater.”
Anora is produced by FilmNation Entertainment and will be released in theaters by NEON on October 18.
Watch the trailer below, set to Blondie’s “Dreaming.”
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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