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The synopsis Shot on a relative shoestring in South Brooklyn’s Russian quarter, Anora was never an obvious contender to dominate the Oscars. But director Sean Baker’s story of a Brooklyn stripper and her shotgun wedding to the son of a Russian oligarch scooped five gongs including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress for Mikey Madison’s fierce yet hypnotically vulnerable portrayal of the titular lead. In many ways, it fits seamlessly into Baker’s singular oeuvre of cinéma vérité movies built around intimate portraits of marginalised characters caught up in sleazy netherworlds: a transgender sex worker in Tangerine (2015), shot on an iPhone; a six-year-old girl stuck with her single mother in a seedy motel in The Florida Project (2017); or a couch-surfing retired porn star in Red Rocket (2021). This one’s been by far the biggest hit, though, even if filmgoing romantics drawn in by the Pretty Woman comparisons might end up just a little bemused.
On location Baker had wanted to film in the faded seaside environs of South Brooklyn well before he had a script — inspired by a fashion shoot he’d done in Coney Island, as well as his longtime friendship with Karren Karagulian, who has acted in each of his films (he plays Toros in Anora), and who arrived from Armenia in 1990 to live among the Russian-speaking community in neighbouring Brighton Beach.
As well as Coney Island scenes, including of the 1927 Cyclone wooden rollercoaster (part of Luna Park, which reopens on March 29; lunaparknyc.com) and the colour-popping Williams Candy Shop (at 1318 Surf Avenue), much of the action in Anora happens around the blocky estates and boardwalk of Brighton Beach — still often referred to as “Little Odessa”, and home to the highest proportion of Russian speakers in the US, many of them Ashkenazi Jews with roots in Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus.
In the movie, the characters go on a crawl of the area — visiting the Tatiana Grill (3145 Brighton 4th St) and nearby Tatiana Restaurant (3152 Brighton 6th St), where there are weekend Slavic variety shows. They visit two Ukrainian-owned café-diners: Skovorodka (615 Brighton Beach Ave), with its snarling Russian bear out front, and the Ocean View Café (290 Brighton Beach Ave; oceanviewcafeny.com), which has no Atlantic view but does much-loved cheese-filled blintz pancakes and mushroom-sauerkraut pierogi.
A key location is the marble-heavy home of the oligarch’s son (“my humble aboard”, as he calls it), a faux-Miami gated mansion overlooking the waters of Mill Basin and opposite the Four Sparrow Marsh nature reserve, a few miles east of the Brighton Beach boardwalk. It was once home to the aluminium and vodka billionaire Vasily Anisimov and his socialite daughter Anna Schafer, and Baker found it by googling “most expensive mansion in Brooklyn”. The strip club where Anora works, with its striking neon heart logo, is the HQ Kony Gentlemen’s Club (hqkony.com), a few blocks west of Manhattan’s Times Square. There’s a detour to Las Vegas, for a wild night in another marble-forward suite at the Palms casino (palms.com), featuring gambling in the swirly-carpeted casino. And there’s a visit to the glowing high-kitsch Little White Chapel (alittlewhitechapel.com) — “God makes it fluffy here,” said its late owner Charolette Richards.
Behind the scenes Anora’s location manager, New Yorker Ross Brodar, has been coming to Brighton Beach since he was a child. “Back then, all the signs were in Russian,” he says. “It’s changed a bit, but it’s still only really rivalled by Chinatown as a place that feels culturally totally different.” Brodar befriended the family who now live in the Mill Basin mansion and ended up living there for three weeks during filming, placating the wealthy neighbours ahead of a scene involving firing off fireworks during a New Year’s Eve party.
He worked with a local Russian-speaking fixer to get permission for semi-improvised shots around Brighton Beach, including a ballroom dancing scene at Tatiana Grill. “It was just a regular Wednesday night, with these older couples dancing after dinner, and they initially had no idea what was happening,” says Brodar. Baker films fast, and one night the crew shot at five different locations. “We just had this bare-bones set-up, pushing a cart with equipment up the boardwalk, ready to capture whatever felt authentic. It’s a challenging way to work, but it’s so fun, and it’s how Sean manages to capture this very singular magic and authenticity.”
While you’re there The Russian enclave of Brighton Beach is undoubtedly evocative, with the L train rumbling overhead, and so much authentic caviar and borscht (Brodar recommends the Tatiana version of the latter). But Coney Island has a more instant appeal: from Luna Park, an amusement park which opened in 1903, to Nathan’s Famous hot dogs (next door to Williams Candy) and America’s last old-style circus sideshow, where the “freaks” may be gone but the sword-swallowers, fire-eaters and glass-walkers remain. The annual Mermaid Parade in late June is a good time to get the vibe, with its high-camp creativity first imagined in 1983 by the top-hatted impresario Dick Zigun, known as the unofficial mayor of Coney Island.
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