Sean Baker
Tangerine was shot on iPhones; Anora won the Palme d'Or and Best Picture. Baker films sex workers and hustlers on America's margins with screwball energy and complete respect.
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Anora
A young sex worker from Brooklyn gets her chance at a Cinderella story when she meets and impulsively marries the son of an oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, her fairytale is threatened as his parents set out to get the marriage annulled.
Defining films
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Both excavate the interior lives of working-class characters with unflinching empathy, refusing sentimentality while demanding we witness their full humanity.
Both anatomize systems of inequality and exploitation through intimate character study, class made visible through gestures, silences, and the spaces people inhabit.
Both use long takes and minimal dialogue to explore desire, vulnerability, and the negotiations between bodies and social structures with rare tenderness.
Both international art cinema fixtures celebrated for patient, unadorned observation of characters at society's edges, formally restrained, ethically uncompromising.
