The film industry is finally beginning to pay attention to films about the underrepresented, and the writer and director Sean Baker is a perfect example of this.
Baker has built his career by making films about the underrepresented. The more success he gains, the more he is able to put a spotlight on the lives of people who are frequently ignored. Through this spotlight, a fuller side of life is revealed. Sean Baker started his directorial debut with Four Letter Words (2000), but started gaining success with his full length film Tangerine (2015), a movie about two transgender sex workers, Sin-Dee and Alexandra, who are on a mission to get to the bottom of a scandalous rumor spread about Sin-Dee’s boyfriend. The film earned many awards in the independent film industry, but gained no attention at big award shows like The Golden Globes or the Oscars. On his continued climb to recognition, Baker released the beautiful, nostalgic, yet soul crushing movie The Florida Project (2017). Baker is known for casting unknown actors, or people not even in the industry, like how the supporting role of the film was a woman Baker found on instagram. But he was able to get Willem Dafoe to play a leading role as the motel manager. The film followed a young girl, Moonee, and her friends living in a motel experiencing their childhood while their mothers struggled to keep their families afloat. Dafoe was nominated for best supporting actor at the Oscars, and while he didn’t win, the film being recognized at such a major awards show would foreshadow what was to come. Baker released Red Rocket in 2021, about a washed-up adult film star returning to his home town hoping to get his life and family back together. With the movie being released during covid, the film didn’t recieve enough of the attention it deserved, but got thousands of great reviews.
It had been three years since Baker had released anything, until on October 18th 2024, Anora hit theatres. The movie follows a young sex worker named Anora, who goes by Ani, who gets a shot at a Cinderella story when one of her clients, Ivan, the young son of an oligarch family in Russia, suddenly proposes to her. What seems to be Ani’s dream quickly falls apart after Ivan runs away in fear of his family learning he’s married to a sex worker. The film was an immediate success, winning countless awards at multiple film festivals and mass amounts of 5-star reviews on Letterboxd. It even won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, the highest prize awarded to the director of the best feature film.
With Anora being expected to be a knockout at the Oscars, the thing that makes the movie so important is what it did for the people it represented. Baker had always been known for depicting the people in society who recieve the least amount of attention, but with his rise to fame and the massive success of Anora, people are finally starting to pay attention. In an interview for AP Entertainment, Baker said:
“Where are the mature films for adults that had human stories? That didn’t have to have explosions or superheros or were horror based. They don’t exist, or there are very few and far between. Let’s get the audience to remember that that stuff is just as worthy of being on the big screen as the big tentpole films, the big blockbusters.”
An example of the compassion in which he makes his films is how Anora was received at a screening specifically for those who worked in the sex industry. At a screening presented by NEON film productions, Baker and his film star Mikey Madison (Anora) hosted a premiere for sex workers and dancers alike. After the film finished, the dancers clacked their high heels in an unusual display of respect and approval. Taking the time to hold a film premiere for the people his very movie is about shows the respect he has for them, the respect he wants the rest of us to have.
Baker exposes us to the raw and unfiltered lives of the people we constantly pass on the street, the people who are demonized in the media and seen as nothing more than the work they do or their lot in life. We have a moral and ethical obligation to look out for, understand and help those who are less fortunate than us. To do that, we have to see these people as complete human beings with the good and the bad. That is how we develop compassion. There are few people who are dedicated to this, and Sean Baker is one of the few in the film industry.
As Baker said at the end of his Palme d’Or acceptance speech:
“This is to all sex workers, past, present and future. This is for you.”
