By Luke Parker Bowles
BEFORE ANORA’S UNLIKELY OSCARS SWEEP, WE WERE BETTING ON IT. WHY?
Some nights are magic. The kind you wish you could bottle up, keep on a shelf, and uncork whenever the world starts feeling a little too ordinary.
So it was at The Playhouse on January 16. After a rapt audience took in a screening of the remarkable film Anora, New Canaan’s own Alex Coco—an infuriatingly young, handsome and altogether brilliant producer—spoke with yours truly about the film, storytelling, and why cinema is still so enormously important.
And then, not six weeks later, there they were, he and the movie’s cast and crew, on stage at the Dolby Theatre, as director Sean Baker held the little statue that symbolizes the Academy’s highest honor, the Oscar for Best Picture.
We couldn’t make this up if we tried.
If you were there that night at The Playhouse, you felt it. The kind of energy that doesn’t just stay in the room—it lingers. It follows you home. Because Anora isn’t just a film. It’s a story with a pulse, sharp and raw and heartbreakingly funny. And at its core, there’s Alex Coco—a New Canaan High School graduate and now the producer of an Academy Award-winning film.
Anora wasn’t supposed to win—at least, not if you ask the major studios, the executives who poured millions of dollars into their marketing campaigns, or the cynics who still believe that independent film is fighting a losing battle. Anora was made with just $6 million—less than the catering budget of some productions—and yet it won. Not because of hype, not because of a franchise, but because it was the best. You get it wrong an awful lot, Hollywood, but this is a delightful surprise.
“We always knew Anora was special,” Baker said after the win. “To see it connect with audiences on this scale? It’s surreal.”
Surreal, yes—but entirely deserved.
Coco’s role producing the independent film required a mix of art, diplomacy, and sheer determination. To do it well means making sure that every single dollar goes to what’s on-screen. It’s about believing in something before the rest of the world does. For Coco, that belief has paid off. But before the golden statues and the standing ovations, before the world decided that Anora was great, Coco was here in New Canaan, talking to a room full of people on the edge of their seats about the power of cinema.
And, if you ask me, that moment—moderating the Q&A session with Alex Coco at The Playhouse, properly passionate about storytelling—that was The Playhouse and its engine, Cinema Lab, showing what we do best. Because here’s the thing: independent films don’t just need to be made. They need to be seen. On the big screen. It doesn’t serve them simply to be dropped onto a streaming platform, where they are easily lost in the mix or, at best, constantly paused as you get a snack, use the loo, get distracted by life’s rich pageant of things demanding your attention. At The Playhouse, we invite you to get out of the house, out of your own head, and to share these moments with people you don’t know, in the dark. There’s nothing like it.
Sean Baker put it eloquently: “Watching a film in a theatre with an audience is an experience. We can laugh together, cry together, scream in fright together, perhaps sit in devastated silence together. And in a time in which the world can feel very divided, this is more important than ever.”
The man is right. You simply cannot replace the feeling of sitting in a dark room with neighbors, gasping in unison, feeling something real together. There’s a reason filmmakers still fight for that experience. It’s the reason we fought to bring The Playhouse back to life in the first place.
The night Coco was here exemplifies why we do this. If we’re very lucky, we will continue to be a small part of stories like this, slightly ahead of the rest of the world. And not just because we’re proud to have championed the people who wound up on stage that night, although of course we are. It’s because we want to spark something in the audience.
Let’s say you’re an aspiring film maker in New Canaan, scribbling a script in your notebook, convinced that you’ll never make it in film because you’re not from Hollywood, not from New York, not from the places where “real” filmmakers come from. And then, one night, you watch a guy who went to your high school—whom you once spent an evening with at a local movie theatre after watching his film, surrounded by strangers and neighbors—take home an Oscar.
That does something.
At The Playhouse, we know this. We aren’t just running a cinema; we are building a place where you are always welcome and where stories begin. Where you can sit in a theatre and hear someone like Alex Coco say, I was right where you are. Keep going.
You don’t always realize you’re in the midst of something brilliant until after it’s happened. But, if you’re lucky, you’ll be in the room when it does.
Luke Parker Bowles is the Co-CEO and Founder of Cinema Lab/The Playhouse in New Canaan.
