Know Anora’s sex workers now looking at the success of the Academy Awards

When Luna Sofia Miranda approached Sean Baker in a Striptease club in New York in 2022, he did everything possible to enchant him.

But he “clearly didn’t want to buy a lap dance,” she says.

Miranda, who was 23 years old at that time, began to ask why he and his wife were there.

“I’m very curious,” she says. “So I kept asking them questions and finally I took them out of them. They were making a movie about Strippers.”

She told them that she had studied acting and, after a successful audition, received a call on her 24th birthday, to offer a part in the movie.

That movie, Anora, is now seen as one of the favorites who go to the Oscars on Sunday.

It is directed by Baker, and is starring Mikey Madison, who is the best actress of his role as Stripper in New York.

Madison, 25, was based on Strippers of real life to help her perfect the part.

When he won a Bafta movie award Last month, he dedicated it to the community of sex workers.

“I have been able to know part of that community through my film research, and that has been one of the most incredible parts of making the movie,” he told us on stage.

“They deserve respect and do not understand often. And so I had to say something,” he added.

We have been talking to the actresses, strippers and dancers in the film about their experiences of working on it, and their thoughts about the finished product.

Some praised the film as realistic, particularly in their representation of the rejection and exhaustion that sex workers often feel. But others said the film was “limited.”

Edie Turquet was initially not sure to participate in the movie.

The 21-year-old, who is British and appeared in Harry Potter Spin-Off Fantastic Beasts as a child, now lives in New York, where he is a student and Stripper.

She was chosen as a background dancer in Anora after a casting agent saw her at the club where she was working. But Turquet says the night before filming, he discussed not appearing.

“I didn’t want to be part of a Stripper Bad movie, or anything that harms our industry, so I was worried,” he told me.

“Most Strippers films are super overtus, bad and exploiters.”

Edie points out the 2020 Zola movie, on a waitress who goes to Florida for a quick cash dispossession weekend. “I found it hyperbolic, totally exaggerating work, and it seemed that I was talking to women,” he said.

“And don’t make me start with Pretty Woman, which is irritating, especially the idea of ​​a street worker played by Julia Roberts. We are going.”

But when Turquet realized that Anora was a Sean Baker movie, he changed his mind.

“His films are based on realism, he has a cinema style to fly on the wall, which I love,” he said. “So I was depressed.”

Baker’s cinematographic skills were also what attracted Lindsey Normington to the film. The actress and Stripper play Diamond, the enemy of Anora’s workplace.

She says she saw him in Afterparty for a movie premiere, and approached him to tell him he was a fan.

They connected on Instagram, and months later, he contacted her to tell her that she could have a role for her in a new movie. “I fell to my knees in my house,” said Normanton.

In the film, Anora is offered the opportunity to escape a fairy tale when he is and falls in love with the son of a rich rich man.

Miranda, an actress and Stripper who plays Anora’s best friend, says she had the task of helping Madison sound like a true sex worker in New York.

“I shared a PDF of the terms of language and jargon that only New York Strippers understand,” he said.

One of those words was “whale”, which, Miranda explains, “is a client who is like a bottomless money well. He will do your night. And he won’t make you work very hard for that.”

He also participated in the movie Kennady Schneider, a stripper and choreographer based in Los Angeles who trained Madison to dance.

She says that Madison installed a post at her home in Los Angeles, and the couple began working on her “sexy routine.”

“She put a lot of work,” said Schneider, 28. “I was so determined.”

This section contains anora spoilers

Miranda said that many of the movie’s songs, about anguish and rejection, were identifiable for her.

“Sometimes I feel like this brilliant toy, with which people want to play. They go, ‘wow, as if you were a stripper. You are great.’ And then they leave you aside and abandon you,” he said.

“I think a lot about the end because I feel a lot like Anora.”

Turquet agrees, calling at the end “very relatable and moving”, and adds that “exhaustion and fatigue” that the strippers often feel.

“The sex industry has a built -in trauma. It felt very real. It is an incredible vulnerable industry,” he said.

“You are endangering each time you are going to work. It is a complex and exhausting job.”

But in general, he said he has feelings found about the film.

“What many Stripper films are lost, and what Anora begins but does not go far enough, is the moral question about men who buy sex,” he said.

“It is the question of consent. Most of these films avoid answering or investigating it.”

She said she also frustrates that these characters “never exist outside their profession.”

“(Anora) is a rather limited character,” he said. “We never learn anything about her. The film takes the perspective of (male protagonists) Igor and Vanya, to define who she is.”

“It is better than any movie I have seen about it, but ultimately is limited, since a sex worker does not say it,” he added. “I can’t wait until we tell our own stories and I hope this opens the door to that.”

For Normington, the film reflected “insecurity and competition and jealousy” that it has personally experienced in clubs.

“I appreciate that you don’t try to be a Stripper movie par excellence.”

Meanwhile, for Schneider, it was the representation of the world of world of work that touched a chord.

In the first scenes of the movie, we see Anora at work, talking with clients in the club.

We also see her and the other strippers at a lunch, eating tupperware boxes in a back room.

“He felt really precise,” Schneider said.

“Many times in the movies (stripper), you have glamorization, with money falling from the ceiling. Those moments happen, but they are few and distant from each other,” he said. “It is much more a quiet hustle.”

When Anora came out, special projections for sex workers in New York and La.

Images circulated on social networks It shows the strippers hitting their high -heeled platform shoes together on their heads, to show their appreciation at the end of the projections.

“That is the most beautiful applause I have received, I don’t know if that will happen again,” Madison told us.

Now, all eyes are in the Oscars.

Miranda and Normingon will attend. “It’s a bit silly to think that I go to the Oscars, but (at the same time) I am in the club arguing with a stupid man more than $ 20,” Miranda said.

“I feel that I am living two lives.”

She said Madison is “perfect” to say that the community of sex workers does not obtain the respect he deserves, and said he hopes that Anora’s success will change that.

“I hope that if this movie wins an Oscar, it marks the beginning of a change in Hollywood, where sex workers are respected, such as workers in their own fields, but also as artists,” he said.

“If this movie wins an Oscar, I want to see that.”