elc team
Sean Baker “returns home” at the opening nights of the 30th anniversary edition of the Athens International Film Festival.
Sean Baker’s film “ANORA”, winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, is the opening film of the 30th Athens International Film Festival.
The Athens International Film Festival Premiere Nights will celebrate 30 years of uninterrupted love for cinema and its people from 2 to 14 October. The international institution will be officially inaugurated on Wednesday 2 October 2024 at the Athens Concert Hall with the national premiere of “ANORA”, a new film by Sean Baker, which began its triumphant run at the Cannes Film Festival, winning the Palme d’Or, and is expected to continue its triumphant run until the next Oscars.
The Athens Film Festival was the first festival in the world to organise a full tribute to the creator of American independent cinema, Sean Baker, in 2015, and hosted a national premiere of all his subsequent creations. “ANORA” is also a film that fully and ideally sums up the spirit and philosophy of the Premiere Nights, a festival that for thirty consecutive years has given a voice to some of the most exciting new voices in world cinema and enthusiastically introduced them to Greek audiences.
Festival Artistic Director Luke Katsikas wrote: “With ANORA, Sean Baker opens his arms wide to another pariah of the American Dream: a fiery and bawdy sex worker who becomes the protagonist (and victim) of her own fairy tale when she meets the prince of her dreams in the form of a spoiled 20-year-old rich kid, son of a Russian oligarch, who is in the United States for a short visit and eager to party wildly with daddy’s money.
The young man meets Anora at the club where he works as a stripper and, in a frenzy of alcohol, adolescent hormones and utter immaturity, makes her his wife in a hasty Las Vegas wedding. Anora quits her job to devote herself to the “saviour” who has volunteered to put her out of her misery. But when the parents learn of their irresponsible son’s antics, they arrange a lightning trip to the United States to break up a marriage they know was clearly made out of naivety and impulse.
ANORA is an unapologetic combination of the fairy tales of “Cinderella” and “Pretty Woman”, without the idealised romance of the former and without the Hollywood gloss of the latter. It has its own unruly character, understands the vernacular of the margins, becomes an adult comedy about social inequalities and shattered dreams, and at the same time a love story of misfortune that gradually becomes an experience of self-discovery and a life lesson for a woman who so desperately wanted to believe in something better”.
The film will be released on 24 October.
