‘Anora’ Director Sean Baker Finds It “Frustrating” That Filmmakers Are “Abandoning Celluloid”

As Sean Baker continues to swear by tried-and-true film, he worries it’s a dying medium in Hollywood.

The Anora writer-director, who shot the Palme d’Or winner on Kodak 35mm, recently mourned the death of analog as he explained how “very frustrating” it is to watch the industry become almost entirely digital.

“People are abandoning celluloid,” Baker told Empire. “We have filmmakers who, for some reason, are okay with their films going directly to streaming, or are just abandoning film altogether, and saying, ‘Hey, I’ll take a series.’ It’s very frustrating for me, for somebody who’s finally broken in after all these years of trying, to see the art form that I love starting to drift away.

He previously used 35mm for The Florida Project (2017) and 16mm for Red Rocket (2021), although his 2015 breakout Tangerine 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 impetuous son of a Russian billionaire. When Vanya’s parents catch wind of the union, they send their henchmen to annul the marriage, setting off a wild chase through the streets of New York.

“For many, many years, Karren [Karagulian] and I have been working together on all of my films, and we’ve always wanted to tell a story about the Russian community and the Russian American community in Brighton Beach and Coney Island, Brooklyn,” Baker told Deadline last month at Toronto International Film Festival.

“Over the course of many years, I finally figured out the plot once I found myself wanting to explore the theme of power dynamics within this world — and with sex work included,” he explained. “And so we thought, how better than to have a young sex worker marry the son of a billionaire? And at that point, we had figured out our beginning, middle, and end.”