Anora (2024) is the fifth consecutive feature film from Sean Baker to focus on the lives of sex workers and similarly marginalized peoples. It tells the story of Anora, or “Ani”, a resilient and powerful young working class woman from the Russian immigrant community of Brighton Beach. The film is a riotous, heartbreaking, uplifting, laugh-out-loud comedy about yielding to flawed yet hopeful fantasies while remaining true to desire.

Ani is a subject divided by complex feelings towards her heritage and daily life. These feelings extend equally towards her mother tongue, which is something she would prefer to avoid. Even so, her ability to speak and understand Russian makes her appealing to Ivan, the truant son of an oligarch, who struggles to speak within an American popular culture where he is a wildly privileged outsider. Ivan, like Ani, is searching for a means to avoid going home, and through their shared experiences bloom a phantasmatic camaraderie that proves impossible for Ivan’s family to accept. Drama follows.

Having swept the Oscars with 5 wins, including Best Picture, this Academy Award winning film is an entertaining opportunity for an intimate encounter with the topic of psychoanalytic fantasy and the psychoanalytic act. Lacanian principles are sparsely understood in the wider psychotherapy community. Discussing this film provides opportunities to illustrate how illusions in mental life are colored by desire and the impossibility of fulfilment.