Indie king Sean Baker soars with sex-worker tale ‘Anora’

As a writer-director-editor celebrated for low-budget indie films, Sean Baker now rates as the movies’ man of the hour with his extravagantly praised “Anora.”

Baker’s comedy-drama about a young stripper/sex worker named Anora – Ani to her friends – won Cannes’ Palme d’Or, its highest honor, last May, the first American to do so since 2011.

After raunchy, inventive films – “Tangerine,” a 2015 transvestite sex worker comedy shot on an iPhone, “The Florida Project” (2017) with Willem Dafoe managing a day rate motel, and the 2021 “Red Rocket” where an ex-porn star returns to his Texas roots – Baker suddenly has enormous exposure and possibilities.

Asked in a Zoom interview what’s now changed, “If anything, it’s solidified me going in the same direction I’ve been going.

“I’ve always been wanting to make these films the way I want to make them, without resistance. Over the years that’s been quite difficult making these films with this subject matter.

“Also, the way I cast puts these films in a place where I can only get so much money to make them. There’s often a lot of, let’s say ‘suggestions.’

“Anora,” he added, “has allowed me just to not hear the noise anymore. I’ve almost been seduced by Hollywood many, many times over the course of the last 20 years. This puts me in a place where I’m not seducible.”

“Anora” took years. “The actual story of ‘Young sex worker meets and marries the son of a Russian oligarch’ began with the desire to tell a story in the Russian-Armenian community of Brighton Beach and Coney Island, and goes back around, oh, seven years.”

Baker worked with actor Karren Karagulian about possibilities. “He’s Toros in the film and is Armenian American, married to a Russian American. He immigrated, landed in Brighton Beach in 1990 selling caviar on the streets.

“His experience led to my telling a story there. It just took us all this time to figure out what it would be.”

Anora as the film’s focus began with “stories that had nothing to do with sex work: young women involved with the Russian gangster world who got themselves into hot water. Very ‘Married to the Mob.’

“I just took the sex work world and applied it to that. I don’t remember exactly when but I was on a Zoom with our Russian-American consultant. I pitched the idea of a young stripper who actually marries an oligarch’s son.

“And this consultant laughed out loud on the Zoom! At that moment I knew I was validated. Because somebody from that community found my little concept funny enough to laugh out loud. At that moment I knew we had our main plot.”

“Anora” opens in theaters Friday.