Notes from the sidelines: Deepanjana Pal writes on Anora and Sthal
The year is 2025 and Anora, an independent film about a sex worker, made on a budget of $6 million, has won the Academy award for best picture. (It won a total of five Oscars, in fact, including Best Director and Best Actress.)
Director Sean Baker begins his tale with a lap dance in a strip club, and ends with a weeping sex worker in a rickety car. In short, not exactly a feel-good, family movie. Yet, for all its heartbreak, Anora is also hilarious in parts, and tender in its gaze, as it follows an oddball group of people straitjacketed by circumstance.
It’s interesting to watch Anora during Donald Trump’s second term as US President, at a time when he seems intent on adding a rom-com epilogue to America’s Cold War tale. He has repeatedly said he trusts Russian President Vladimir Putin and, last week, that America was “doing very well with Russia”.
Trump’s heart-eyed affinity for Putin is an intriguing backdrop for the story of an American dazzled by the wealth of a Russian oligarch, who briefly latches on to the oligarch’s son, hoping he can be her Prince Charming.
Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn) is a hard-partying brat who wants to possess Ani (Mikey Madison), at least momentarily, because he has become charmed by her free-spiritedness. He buys her time, then offers marriage. He delights in being able to treat her like he does his other toys.
Ultimately, Ani must go up against a literal Mother Russia, who insults and humiliates her; and eventually Mother Russia gets her way.
Anora was not a frontrunner at the Oscars, even though Baker’s past two films, The Florida Project (2017) and Tangerine (2015), generated buzz in their years. Perhaps what tipped the scales in Baker’s favour this time around was that Anora’s distributor, Neon, decided to pour $18 million into the Oscar campaign.
The gamble paid off. The Oscars have shot the indie movie into the mainstream. In addition to the expected spike in theatrical revenues, Neon is earning from digital rights. (Anora is already available, for a fee, on streaming platforms, including in India).
On the strength of far less money but as much heart, there was a quiet miracle in India when Jayant Digambar Somalkar’s Marathi film Sthal (2025) got a limited theatrical release last week, two years after it premiered to much acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Set in rural Maharashtra and enacted by a brilliant cast of non-actors, this is an unflinching portrait of what it means to be young and have dreams that are forever clashing with one’s reality. (It’s one of three recent projects that explores what it is like to be a young woman in contemporary India. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the cringe-inducing idiocy of Nadaaniyan. Somewhere in the middle and leaning towards good entertainment is the series Ziddi Girls, which stands out for its cast of women who look and sound credibly like college-goers.)
Sthal opens with a firecracker of a scene: a nervous young man sits, eyes downcast, surrounded by a gaggle of women who bombard him with questions. It’s the classic setting of “seeing the girl”, or meeting a prospective bride, but with the gender roles reversed. And of course, it’s a dream. The reality is that Savita, the dreamer, is the one who must sit with her eyes downcast and answer questions posed to her by groups of men, even though the marriage market is of no interest to her.
As Nandini Chikte, who is incandescent as Savita, put it, while talking about the film, being a young woman can be a “very humiliating” experience.
Indie films like Sthal, which are rich in talent and modest in their budgets, rarely make it to theatres and struggle to find audiences. In his Oscar acceptance speech, Sean Baker exhorted everyone to watch films in theatres. “In a time in which the world can feel very divided, this is more important than ever. It’s a communal experience you simply don’t get at home,” he said. He’s right.
With digital platforms seeming like threats to rather than allies of good cinema, buying a ticket is more important than ever. So go to the movies. It might help save the day for good cinema. In return, an unlikely theatrical release might change the way you see the world.
(To reach Deepanjana Pal with feedback, write to @dpanjana on Instagram)
