India, March 14 -- The year is 2025 and Anora, an independent film about a sex worker, made on a budget of $6 million, has won the Academy award for best picture. (It won a total of five Oscars, in fact, including Best Director and Best Actress.)

Director Sean Baker begins his tale with a lap dance in a strip club, and ends with a weeping sex worker in a rickety car. In short, not exactly a feel-good, family movie. Yet, for all its heartbreak, Anora is also hilarious in parts, and tender in its gaze, as it follows an oddball group of people straitjacketed by circumstance.

It's interesting to watch Anora during Donald Trump's second term as US President, at a time when he seems intent on adding a rom-com epilogue to America's Cold War ta...