If Sean Baker continues to swear by tried and true filmhe fears it is a dying medium in Hollywood.
The Anora writer-director, who shot it Palme d’Or winner on Kodak 35mmrecently mourned the death of analog, explaining how “very frustrating” it is to see the industry becoming almost entirely digital.
“People give up celluloid”, said Bakker Empire. “We have filmmakers who, for one reason or another, are okay with their films going straight to streaming, or who just forego the film altogether and say, ‘Hey, I’ll do a series.’ It’s very frustrating for me, as someone who has finally broken in after all these years of trying, to see the art form I love starting to drift away.
He previously used 35mm for this The Florida Project (2017) and 16mm for Red rocket (2021), although his breakthrough came in 2015 Mandarine was filmed with an iPhone 5S.
In Anora, Mikey Madison stars as Ani, a young sex worker from Brooklyn, whose life takes an unexpected turn when she meets and impulsively marries Vanya (Mark Eidelstein), the rambunctious son of a Russian billionaire. When Vanya’s parents learn of the union, they send their henchmen to annul the marriage and initiate a wild chase through the streets of New York.
Sean S. Baker of Anora at the Deadline Studio at the Bisha Hotel during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2024 in Toronto, Canada.
“For many, many years, Karren (Karagulian) and I have been working together on all my films, and we have always wanted to tell a story story about the Russian community and the Russian-American community in Brighton Beach and Coney Island, Brooklyn,” Baker told Deadline at the Toronto International Film Festival last month.
“Over the course of many years, I finally discovered the plot when I found myself wanting to explore the theme of power dynamics in this world – and including sex work,” he explained. “And so we thought: what could be better than marrying a young sex worker to the son of a billionaire? And at that point we had figured out our beginning, middle and end.