Sean Baker’s screwball sex worker comedy Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, will receive a fall theatrical release by distributor Neon.
Baker’s film about a young sex worker’s romantic entanglement with the son of a Russian oligarch will get a theatrical release starting Oct. 18, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. The fall release places Anora in contention for awards consideration.
The fall release for a top Cannes award winner has worked for Neon before, having had an impressive track record releasing earlier Palme d’Or winners like Parasite in 2019, Triangle of Sadness in 2022 and last year Anatomy of a Fall.
Baker’s past credits include The Florida Project and Red Rocket. The director’s low-budget features about people overlooked by society have become critical hits and awards season contenders.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney writes of Anora in his Cannes review: “One of the things Sean Baker does exceptionally well is draw us into a vivid and highly specific milieu, nurturing our affections for characters who are rough-edged, to put it mildly, and then whip up a vortex of steadily escalating chaos. The writer-director is like a conductor of raw symphonies about people from the marginalized fringes caught in a dizzying whirl, sometimes of their own making and sometimes not. Sex workers have been a big part of Baker’s gallery of outsiders, which makes Anora a fine addition to his terrific body of work.”
Neon picked up the comedy set in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn ahead of Anora debuting in competition in Cannes. Baker produced his latest film with Samantha Quan and Alex Coco.
FilmNation has global rights to Anora, which also stars Mark Eydelshteyn, Yuriy Borisov, Karren Karagulian and Vache Tovmasyan.