POLE POSITION

Winner of this year's prestigious Palme d'Or in Cannes, Sean Baker's Anora is a loud and lewd love story gone awry, as a Brooklyn pole dancer discovers her Prince Charming is a frog. Total Film meets the writer/director and his team to talk dreams, screams and extremes.

-  JAMES MOTTRAM

When Sean Baker got the call that he and the crew of his new film Anora were required to attend the prize-giving ceremony at this year's Cannes Film Festival, he figured they'd be winning something. 'Never in the world did I think that we'd be taking home the Palme d'Or,' marvels the director, whose only previous Cannes competition entry was 2021's Red Rocket. But shortly after George Lucas received an honorary Palme from his old friend Francis Ford Coppola, Anora was called.

Three months later, Baker is still trying to process the events of that night, as jury head Greta Gerwig awarded his raucous film the biggest prize in world cinema. 'This is not just a dream. This is the dream for me,' he says. 'This was my dream come true. This is what I've been focusing on for the last 30 years. And that is no embellishment there. And I actually thought it was going to happen later in life. I thought I was going to have to travel a very long road and maybe win it at 80.'

When Total Film connects with Baker over Zoom, he's just woken up and this is the first interview he's done since Cannes. Dressed in a T-shirt bearing the legend 'Coney Island', he swears it's coincidence. But given Anora is set close to the famed amusement park seen in The Warriors and so many other movies, it’s hard not to raise a smile. The story of a Brooklyn lap dancer named Anora (or ‘Ani’ for short) began life, Baker says, with a desire to make a film set in the Russian-American community in New York, specifically Brighton Beach near to Coney Island.