It Pays to Bet on Neon for the Palme d’Or at Cannes

Bragging rights! Photo: Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images

If you love to gamble, it’ll probably pay off to bet on Neon at the Cannes Film Festival. For the fifth year in a row, the independent film studio has won the Palme d’Or, with Sean Baker’s Anora being this year’s winner (Anatomy of a Fall, Triangle Of Sadness, Titane, and Parasite won previously). Baker is also the first American filmmaker to win since 2011’s The Tree of Life. Anora follows Better Things’s Mikey Madison as the titular character and stripper who marries a Russian oligarch’s son, whose parents try to break up their marriage. In his acceptance speech, Baker also reminds the audience of the importance of watching movies in the cinema: “The world has to be reminded that watching a film at home, while scrolling through your phone and checking emails and half-paying attention is just not the way, although some tech companies would like us to think so. Watching a film with others in a movie theater is one of the great communal experiences. We share laughter, sorrow, anger, fear and hopefully have a catharsis with our friends and strangers. So I say the future of cinema is where it started: in a movie theater.”