Taina Bien-Aimé – Executive Director of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
The opening of Sean Baker’s 2024 indie film, Anora, takes you into the back rooms of a strip club called “Headquarters,” peppered with men sprawled in leather seats as young naked women gyrate on their groins. In soft-focus and voyeuristic, a facsimile of the male gaze, these first scenes make one wonder why softcore porn is doubling as an Oscar-nominated movie.
Ani – short for Anora – is 23, and one of the contracted women at Headquarters. Of Uzbek descent, she is feisty, scrappy, and always on alert for the next attack against her.
One night, the manager orders Ani to tend to a patronizer seeking a Russian speaker. Ani begrudgingly obliges and greets Vanya, whom she soon finds out is the son a Russian oligarch. A 21-year-old feckless man-child, Vanya spends his days playing video games and hosting lavish, drug-filled parties at his oceanfront Brooklyn mansion.
He hires Ani for a week-long, $15,000 “girlfriend experience.” the end of which, drunk on his paid-for-sex smorgasbord, proposes they marry in Las Vegas. Though the relationship between Ani and Vanya is manufactured and twisted by an acute power imbalance, Ani accepts as long as she gets a 3-carat diamond ring.
