Two of 2024’s most talked about, putatively feminist films—Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance and Sean Baker’s Anora—both tell stories of women who make their livings exploiting the male gaze and both subject their heroine to a misogynist cinematic trope: the butt shot. This essay explores whether Fargeat and Baker reappropriate the butt shot through their repeated use of it in these films. Reclaiming or reappropriating a cinematic trope involves acknowledging its prior derogatory meaning and imbuing it with affirmative energy to empower or unify those previously hurt by it. After reviewing the butt shot’s historic organization of visual pleasure, I analyze its satiric use in both The Substance and Anora and ultimately argue that while Fargeat and Baker complicate the butt shot by recontextualizing it (in parody and neorealism, respectively), they never succeed in overwriting its chauvinist history.

You know it when you see it: the butt shot. It can be anything from a close-up to a medium long shot, a direct view or profile, naturally or artistically lit, whatever supports the spectator’s focus on the cheeks. A butt shot can also be a follow shot, point of view shot, or mirror shot, but it never obscures its object. Any clothes the butt sports are there only to enhance the spectator’s visual pleasure. If anything blocks or overshadows the bum, it might still be a great shot, but it isn’t a butt shot.

The bearers of these bottoms can be cis men or trans people, but the paradigmatic target of the butt shot is the cis woman. Women’s buttocks play a prominent role in histories of racialization, and the butt shot contributes to those discourses. Butt shots date back to cinema’s earliest days, but classical Hollywood arguably perfected the butt shot, making it a defining component of the studio system’s heteropatriarchal organization of visual pleasure. Laura Mulvey doesn’t analyze the butt shot in her classic essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), but her theory of the male gaze encapsulates the spectatorial dynamics behind it.1 The camera, the viewer, and possibly another character ogle the woman’s heinie as a fetish object, denying her humanity by exerting the power of their look. These dynamics do change in queer, trans, and BIPOC cinema, and when the butt belongs to a cis white man, but the butt shot fundamentally eroticizes and objectifies.

Given the trope’s debasing history, one might wonder why there are so many butt shots peppering two recent, much celebrated, and putatively feminist films: Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) and Sean Baker’s Anora (2024). Both movies tell stories about white women who make their livings by exploiting the male gaze, then must learn to survive when patriarchy inevitably double-crosses them. Both critique cultures that treat women like objects, and both were among the most nominated and awarded films of 2024. The Substance competed for the Palme d’Or and won Best Screenplay at Cannes; it was also nominated for six Oscars at the Academy Awards—including Best Actress in a Leading Role for star Demi Moore—and won Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Moore won multiple other Best Actress awards but lost that Oscar to Mikey Madison, star of Anora. Anora claimed four more Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, which it added to the Palme d’Or and innumerable other awards. Critics hailed Anora as a masterpiece, giving particular credit to Baker as one of “the most humanist filmmakers working today” and cinematographer Drew Daniels for his “miraculously un-sleazy camera.”2 They also praised The Substance as a “smart, witty, feminist, dark, twisted fairy tale” and applauded Fargeat’s “consciously feminist vision.”3

Yet both The Substance and Anora begin with eroticized spectacles of female flesh, including unmistakable butt shots. As tushie after tushie commands the screen, one begins to wonder whether they’re there to lampoon prior misogynist filmmaking, or whether Fargeat and Baker are trying to reclaim the butt shot. Reclaiming or reappropriating a word or visual trope involves recognizing its derogatory meaning and recoding it to empower or unify those previously defamed by it. Reading Fargeat and Baker’s butt shots in the context of their previous work and the films’ political projects helps to clarify the distinction between satire and reappropriation by revealing how these filmmakers fail to forge new meaning for the butt shot, relying instead on its age-old dehumanizing spectacle.

To be more specific, The Substance and Anora both feature butt shots of their protagonists in inverse proportion to narrative opportunities for identification and sympathy, suggesting that the power dynamics of the butt shot haven’t changed. Fargeat and Baker represent their female leads as sex objects, that is, until they want viewers to understand the characters as people. Consequently, the films’ butt shots remain parodic at best and dehumanizing at worst.

It is impossible to identify the first butt shot in film history, because objectifying women was so prevalent in pre- and early cinema. Mutoscope, Kinetoscope, George Méliès, and many others released erotic shorts during the 1890s, with Mutoscope becoming notorious for multiple vignettes called What the Butler Saw—namely white women in states of partial to full nudity, often with their backsides turned to the camera. Kinetoscope found opportunities to linger on the male tuchus as well, particularly that of Eugene Sandow, a body builder whose buttocks thrice fascinated W. K. L. Dickson’s camera (1894). Importantly, early white filmmakers also fetishized Black women’s bottoms, frequently while making them the butt of a joke. These butt shots both extended a nineteenth-century Euro-American preoccupation with Black women’s sexuality and reified white womanhood, a misogynoir trend that arguably persists in the blanched color correction of many white butt shots today (including Fargeat’s and Baker’s).

In 1974, Tobe Hooper made butt shots an iconic element of the American horror film by using low-angle follow shots to eroticize suspense in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Hooper’s technique quickly became a genre convention, so much so that even an ostensibly gender-blind movie like Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) couldn’t conclude without a few peaks at Sigourney Weaver’s skinny seat. The year 1978 introduced horror audiences to the comely bottom of Demi Moore, who doesn’t appear within I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) yet posed posteriorly for its theatrical release poster. Moore’s butt played a prominent role in her subsequent career as a movie star, particularly during the 1990s, when a more toned version of her derrière featured in Indecent Proposal (Adrian Lyne, 1993), Disclosure (Barry Levinson, 1994), The Scarlet Letter (Roland Joffé, 1995), Striptease (Andrew Bergman, 1996), and G. I. Jane (Ridley Scott, 1997).

Demi Moore posed anonymously for the theatrical poster of I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978). Courtesy © Comcast Productions.

Demi Moore posed anonymously for the theatrical poster of I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978). Courtesy © Comcast Productions.

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G. I. Jane makes Moore’s butt the center of its getting-into-shape montage, picking up, one might argue, on the fetishization of well-muscled male—and occasionally female—asses in 1980s and 1990s action movies.4 Whereas classical Hollywood provided audiences with narrative alibis for staring at a guy’s tight butt (such as athletic contests or dance sequences), and the 1970s ushered in a cycle of white teen movies in which young men “moon” diegetic authority figures, 1980s action movies frequently objectified their celebrity beefcakes by showing off their cakes. Displayed as signs of physical and sexual ability, these built bottoms belonged to (among others) Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987), and Kurt Russell and Sylvester Stallone in Tango & Cash (André Konchalovsky, Andrew Magnoli, Peter MacDonald, 1989). Jean-Claude Van Damme’s booty appears prominently in pretty much every movie he made from 1988’s Bloodsport (Newt Arnold) through 2015’s Pound of Flesh (Ernie Barbarash). Van Damme flexes his glutes in center frame as he kicks, dances, showers, and copulates. The films’ narratives establish his characters’ exceptional athleticism, as do most of Van Damme’s butt shots, but others are just for fun—such as the extended split that begins Double Impact (Sheldon Lettich, 1991). Van Damme and his directors, scholars, and critics have all noted that the action star’s “coquettish” presentation of his muscular rump is both “for the girls” and for the guys, in as much as Van Damme embraces his gay male fandom.5 His butt shots thus intersect with the long history of male butt shots in queer and queer-coded cinema, a diverse tradition that, during these decades, included Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980), A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985), and Zero Patience (John Greyson, 1993).

Queer-coding and queer reception aside, the male action hero butt shot builds on the cis female butt shot, accepting the objectification—but not the abjection—of the trope by visually emphasizing gluteal strength, or power rather than penetrability. As G. I. Jane demonstrates, female action stars can also sustain such backhanded empowerment, though their butt shots never transcend sexual objectification. Indeed, Coralie Fargeat adopts this contradiction as a motif in Revenge (2017), a rape-revenge story about a young woman named Jen (Matilda Lutz) who is brutally assaulted by her boyfriend’s hunting buddy before being left for dead in the desert. In the film’s first act, frequent butt shots encourage the spectator to dismiss Jen as a hypersexual naïf who wants only “to be noticed.” New York Times critic A. O. Scott observes that Jen’s butt shots follow the trope’s “time-honored cinematic conventions: from behind at a low angle as she walks around in her underwear or bathing suit.”6 Things change in the second act, when Jen uses her impressive survival skills to track and kill her rapist. Jen wears no more than panties and a sports bra during these scenes, but Fargeat lays off the butt shots as viewers learn to root for her. Only pictured in long shots, Jen’s glutes are now reincorporated into her resilient physique. Demeaning butt shots return during the film’s last act, however, when Jen stalks her naked (ex)boyfriend through his house before killing him. Repeated medium shots of his ass convey his emasculation by a superior hunter. These butt shots again make their object the butt of the joke, because they still equate penetrability with powerlessness. They satirize rather than reappropriate the butt shot, because while the gender of their target changes, their indignity does not.

Jean-Claude Van Damme shows off his glutes in Double Impact (Sheldon Lettich, 1991). Courtesy © Stone Group Pictures.

Jean-Claude Van Damme shows off his glutes in Double Impact (Sheldon Lettich, 1991). Courtesy © Stone Group Pictures.

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One of many butt shots for Sue (Margaret Qualley) in The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024). Courtesy © Mubi.

One of many butt shots for Sue (Margaret Qualley) in The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024). Courtesy © Mubi.

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Fargeat continues experimenting with butt shots in The Substance, so much so that they drive the film’s farcical style. The spectator first catches sight of protagonist Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) as she leads a workout show that begins with hip gyrations and shoulder dips before giving way to swivel kicks—and butt shots. Elisabeth cheerfully orders her audience to “Feel that power, ladies!” as she and her back-up dancers set unrealistic standards for middle-aged asses. Elisabeth’s show strongly resembles Jane Fonda’s Workout (Sidney Galanty, 1982) and its sequels, as they, too, star a famous actress in a belted leotard spouting platitudes. Unlike Fonda, Elisabeth also demeans her audience, asking them, “You wanna look like a giant jellyfish on the beach?” This question foreshadows Elisabeth’s own fate and undermines the ostensibly empowering politics of her show and her butt shots. They are not—or not only—an aesthetic celebration of mid-life sexuality but also a reminder to women to internalize the male gaze, to fear and resent their aging bodies.

The camera next directs the spectator’s attention to Elisabeth’s rump as she stands naked before her bathroom mirror, contemplating her mortality and the meaning of selfhood. She has recently acquired a black-market drug that promises to “release another version of you”— “another” here meaning “younger, more beautiful, [and thus] more perfect.” Insert shots show Elisabeth evaluating her face, breasts, and belly, but only the spectator gets to judge her buttocks. Moore has complained that this butt shot “bugs the shit out of me,” perhaps because it seems designed to shock and disgust.7 From the black and white grid of bathroom tiles to the high-key lighting that exposes every asymmetry, Fargeat’s composition doesn’t teach viewers to love Elisabeth’s body but to join her in yearning for a better version. One might argue that Fargeat is putting her star through this excruciating exposure to demonstrate how irrevocably Elisabeth’s self-image has been colonized by heteropatriarchal beauty standards. Such a reading would build on Carol Clover’s observation that horror movies encourage victim-identification and reconcile it with Mulvey’s seemingly (but not actually) antithetical claim that the male gaze objectifies and punishes women.8 So far, so feminist—except Fargeat’s composition invites the viewer’s disgust by encouraging them to adopt the very beauty standards torturing Elisabeth.

When the new version of Elisabeth arrives, she is awed by her ostensible perfection. After Sue (Margaret Qualley) emerges from Elisabeth’s back, the camera occupies her point of view as she stumbles to the mirror to admire her figure, including her taught, round rear. Once the camera detaches from Sue’s point of view, it zooms out to a medium-long butt shot that recreates Elisabeth’s earlier enframement before the mirror. But now Sue’s ass is the most aestheticized object in the frame, greased and blanched to solicit the viewer’s approval. Sue quickly recognizes that “in a world ordered by sexual [and racial] imbalance,” her superlative white ass generates power.9 She starts capitalizing on the male gaze, showcasing her bottom in leotards, miniskirts, and short shorts as she pursues Elisabeth’s old job. In fact, she wields her booty like a weapon in pursuit of fame.

Referring to Sue’s booty as her weapon is my best attempt to reconcile Fargeat’s satiric feminism with the dozens of butt shots that follow Sue’s entrée into television. Sue does participate eagerly in her own objectification; she smiles knowingly when she first spots the pink, tanga-cut lamé leotard that will become her signature costume. That leotard not only wins her Elisabeth’s show (quickly renamed Pump It Up with Sue) but also determines its aesthetic, including backup dancers in even skimpier lamé outfits. Sue’s routine on Pump It Up bears little resemblance to Elisabeth’s comparatively tame calisthenics. It begins with a deep wide-leg squat and hip wiggles, then adds chest thrusts, body rolls, and twerking. The two-minute sequence treats viewers to seventeen butt shots in all and countless low-angle crotch shots, thereby exaggerating the workout-video-as-softcore-porn subgenre that Ron Harris introduced with Aerobicise (Showtime, 1981-1982) and 20 Minute Workout (City, 1983-1985).

Fargeat may intend Sue’s butt shots to be ironic, but if so, their satire collapses when Fargeat starts humanizing her character and stops objectifying her. This process begins when Elisabeth and Sue finally meet, after Elisabeth considers killing Sue (to end Sue’s exploitation of her life-giving spinal fluid), and before Sue retaliates by beating Elisabeth to death. Despite myriad opportunities for butt shots during their fight montage, Fargeat doesn’t emphasize Sue’s ass. Instead, she ends the sequence with close-ups of Sue’s blood- and tear-streaked face as she realizes what she’s done. In killing Elisabeth, she’s destroyed her other half—along with the only source of the precious bodily liquid keeping her alive. Fargeat continues to emphasize Sue’s facial reactions as her body breaks down. Her butt is finally less important than her face now that the latter conveys fear and contrition.

Unfortunately, while Sue’s butt shots stop, Fargeat’s do not: she peppers the film’s climax with posterior shots of topless background dancers from the New Year’s Eve show that will be the setting for Sue’s final disintegration. Framed within bejeweled G-strings, these anonymous cheeks skitter back and forth across the screen—but to what end? Perhaps another viewer could discern a feminist message among them, but all I saw were more hypersexualized buttocks providing mordant contrast to Sue’s physical disintegration.

Fargeat relies on full-body rather than butt shots once Jen (Matilda Lutz) begins to take her Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2017). Courtesy © M.E.S. Productions.

Fargeat relies on full-body rather than butt shots once Jen (Matilda Lutz) begins to take her Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2017). Courtesy © M.E.S. Productions.

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In sum, Fargeat’s attempts to reclaim the butt shot—to mitigate its chauvinist connotations and refashion it as feminist commentary—are too ambivalent to be effective.10 If her satire is meant to identify and critique the heteropatriarchal objectification of women, then its butt shots ought not appear in scenes that diminish women’s humanity. If the butt shots are there to convey power, the weaponization of objectification against the male gaze, then they shouldn’t stop once the spectator has begun to sympathize with the butt’s owner. Fargeat’s films are violent, playful, and self-righteously angry in some very appealing ways; her exaggerated color saturation imbues her costumes and sets with lavish visual pleasure. Her butt shots provide visual pleasure too—perhaps even ironic pleasure—but they never convey a stable counter-message. They fail to disrupt the misogynist spectatorial dynamic Mulvey identified fifty years ago.

Sean Baker’s butt shots similarly undermine Anora, a presumptively feminist refutation of Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990). Baker’s approach is alternately realist and playfully satirical as he cleaves the hooker with a heart of gold cliché from Pretty Woman’s Cinderella plot. Anora stars Mikey Madison as Ani, an exotic dancer who does sex work on the side. Ani becomes enamored with and marries one of her clients—Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the immature son of a notorious Russian oligarch—but their whirlwind romance collapses once his parents find out about it.

Anora begins by panning across five dancers performing for customers in private booths. Strictly speaking, a pan may not qualify as a butt shot, but Daniels’s moving camera captures two asses in intimate close-up before it finds Ani. Zooming in on her face as she dances, Daniels quickly and efficiently teaches the spectator that this is the stripper they should care about, not those anonymous extras. Yet it takes only two minutes for Anora to showcase Ani’s ass for the first of many times. Like Marshall, Baker encourages viewers to identify with his heroine, providing her with friends, a sister, and a little bit of a backstory. Like Marshall, Baker also visually introduces his heroine using the same objectifying gaze through which her clients see her. In Marshall’s case, that means breaking Vivian (Julia Roberts) down into a sequence of eroticized body parts, although he doesn’t get around to his first butt shot until Vivian encounters a prospective client. In a kindred fashion, Baker follows Ani’s first butt shot with a montage of her working the club, enticing men to see her as a collection of body parts. This sequence includes a humorous vignette in which Ani and fellow dancer Lulu (Luna Sofia Miranda) share a joint. Lulu complements Ani on her “classy” butterfly nail charm, laughing that she got “dollar signs, like a real ho.” Alas, this praise portends a subsequent insult, when Vanya’s father dismisses Ani as a “night butterfly.”

Ani is a complex, intriguing character, but her arc develops in inverse proportion to her cinematic objectification. The more respect the film cultivates for her, the less of her body it exposes, a pattern that subtly reinforces the demeaning implications of the butt shot. Baker foregrounds Ani’s ass repeatedly during the first half of the film. It is on display in moments when Ani embraces her professional prowess, but it is also on display while she is bound and restrained by men she does not know, men she believes are going to rape her. Thus, Ani’s bottom is not simply a symbol of sexual empowerment, as it might seem during the film’s joyful first act. It is also a sign of abjection, of Ani’s physical and economic vulnerability.

At first, I assumed that Anora’s butt shots represented a critique of clients who regard sex workers as bodies rather than people. But Baker never employs this dehumanizing trope in any of his other films about prostitutes and adult performers.11 Moreover, the film’s final scene reintroduces Ani’s butt while exhorting the spectator pity her. After being forced to annul her marriage by Vanya’s parents and their goons, Ani accepts $10,000 and a ride home from the kindest goon, Igor (Yura Borisov), who seems to have something of a crush on her. The camera occupies Igor’s point of view as Ani makes direct eye contact with him, then reverses direction to record her rump as she climbs across the front seat and onto Igor’s lap. Her butt is the brightest thing in the frame as Ani hikes up her skirt and begins to masturbate him. Ani refuses to kiss Igor during their brief congress, suggesting that she has adopted Vivian’s prohibition on kissing during transactional sex. But when Igor makes lingering eye contact and tries to embrace her, Ani breaks down sobbing. The camera zooms in on Igor holding her until her face begins to leave the frame, confirming him as the main character of Anora’s last shot. Baker’s subsequent cut to black leaves Ani’s fate unclear, though her ass was anything but. Its final close-up confirms Baker’s earnest commitment to traditional butt shots; it reminds the viewer that whatever else Ani may be, she is also always a sex object.

Ani (Mikey Madison) in the final scene of Anora (Sean Baker, 2024). Courtesy © Neon.

Ani (Mikey Madison) in the final scene of Anora (Sean Baker, 2024). Courtesy © Neon.

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Baker has never publicly claimed to be a feminist, but he does equate filmmaking with social activism.12 Like Fargeat—who does identify as a feminist—Baker challenges the conventions of Hollywood realism to critique its chauvinism. Both Fargeat and Baker have made headlines and won awards for their ostensibly anti-patriarchal filmmaking, yet close analysis of the films leaves little doubt that The Substance and Anora rely on a misogynist cinematic trope. Reappropriating a trope or a word requires both acknowledging its history and imbuing it with affirmative energy. That combination marks the difference between empowerment and satire. Fargeat and Baker complicate the butt shot by recontextualizing it, in parody and neorealism respectively, but they never use the butt shot to humiliate the heteropatriarchal order that invented it, as the Wachowski sisters do in Bound (1996). That butt shot arrives during a proleptic sequence in which a closeted lesbian plays the willing ingénue in order to steal $2 million from the mob. In as much as the prolepsis reflects her butch lover’s plan for their heist, the shot represents the lover’s fantasy of how readily straight men underestimate a woman in a tight dress. The Wachowskis thus transform the butt shot into a sign of heteropatriarchal naïveté. It remains to be seen how future filmmakers will reclaim this archaic cinematic convention, but Fargeat and Baker did not bring audiences that kind of ass.

1.

Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 7th ed., eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford University Press, 2009), 721.

2.

Tomris Laffly, “Anora”, RogerEbert.com. October 16, 2024, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/anora/; Jessica Kiang, “Anora: Sean Baker’s demolition of the Pretty Woman fantasy is his most vivid creation yet,” Sight and Sound, October 29, 2024, www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/anora-sean-bakers-demolition-pretty-woman-fantasy-his-most-vivid-creation-yet.

3.

Anne Thompson, “How French Filmmaker Coralie Fargeat Delivered Feminist Body Horror Breakout The Substance,” IndieWire, September 18, 2024, www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/coralie-fargeat-feminist-body-horror-the-substance-1235048769; Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, “The Substance is a Documentary,” Film International, September 3, 2024, https://filmint.nu/coralie-fargeat-the-substance-is-a-documentary-alexandra-heller-nicholas/.

4.

For context, Pam Grier’s breasts were fetishized more than her butt in her 1970s Blaxploitation films. Jennifer Lopez’s butt became a cultural obsession in the late 1990s, but Lopez made only two action films during that era, neither of which played a significant role in this discourse. See Stephane Dunn, “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press, 2008), 111-112; Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (New York University Press, 2004), 228-246.

5.

Jeffrey A. Brown, “‘They can imagine anything they want … ’: Identification, Desire, and the Celebrity Text,” Discourse 19, no. 3 (1997): 131-132.

6.

A. O. Scott, “Review: In ‘Revenge,’ the Trophy Turns Hunter,” New York Times, May 9, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/movies/revenge-review.html.

7.

Kayla Webley Adler, “Demi Moore Bares Her Soul,” Elle, November 14, 2024, www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a62581060/demi-moore-the-substance-women-in-hollywood-interview-2024/.

8.

Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton University Press, 1992, rev. 2015), 8; Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 714-716.

9.

Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 715.

10.

Regarding Fargeat’s feminist intentions for her butt shots, see Mai Lee Vicino, “Butts and Guts: Coralie Fargeat injects us with five insights into her satirical splatter-fest The Substance,” Letterboxd, September 28, 2024, https://letterboxd.com/journal/coralie-fargeat-the-substance-interview.

11.

Anora is Baker’s fifth film about sex workers, after Starlet (2012), Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017), and Red Rocket (2021).

12.

Sophie Monks Kaufman, “Sean Baker: ‘If you’re a filmmaker in the 21st century, it’s hard not to be a social activist,’” Little White Lies, November 9, 2017, https://lwlies.com/interviews/sean-baker-the-florida-project.