The Russian Oligarch Behind Anora’s Brooklyn Mansion

A list of a megamation of the Moulin basin shows that it is not only huge – 14,000 square feet – but out of its element, more Miami than Brooklyn. This disconnection made it perfect for AorWhere he plays the role of a fairy tale palace, too good to be true.
Photo: Bergen Basin Realty

This article was initially published on October 18, 2024. Aor won the Oscar for the best film 2025 and also won the trophies For the best director, original script, publisher and main actress.

Before director Sean Baker finished the script that would become AorHe was looking for locations that would show an aspect of American Russian life in New York. This is how Baker works, an approach he has called The cinema “anthropological or sociological”, which allows places and people who live there and work there to shape its characters and inspire its plots. For AorBaker envisaged a scene in a vaping store, then discovered a candy store at the old school and gave a job to a character there. These real treats base a story of Cinderella that follows Ani (Mikey Madison), a wise stripper who knows enough Russian of her grandmother to discuss with a client, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn). He turns out to be the son of an oligarch, and Ani has the first glimpse of his wealth during a visit to his modern castle where their love story takes place. These scenes were shot last year in a Brooklyn manor built by the family of a real Russian oligarch. And baker said Variety That he found the house quite easily, after a Google search for “the biggest and best manor in Brighton Beach”.

new Yorkthe cover of
Film by Sean Baker.

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The real house is actually a rapid training far in the factory basin, a district by the water where Russian families Buy for decades. 2458 National Drive is not only enormous, it is distinctive. A facade of limestone, stucco and dark glass resembles a cross between a Mansion at the Miami Sea Front And Getty extension of Richard Meier. A semi-circle of stairs leads to a double door, flanked by wings like the blades of a science fiction ship. Then there is the interior – a large endless marble floor room and large views of Jamaica bay, where a hidden door, leveled against a mirror, is revealed to hold coats. The exterior is a pool of 1,000 square feet, a private platform and a pavilion that can accommodate 40 years. Below, rooms for staff, a theater and a garage with white walls. And a curved staircase are suitable for five bedrooms with huge cupboards and bathrooms filled with marble – including a primary with large windows above the water.

“It was my mother’s room,” recalls Anna SchaferBorn Anna Anisimova. Once a model labeled “Russian Paris Hilton” by this magazine, she was a teenager like Aor‘S Ivan when his family had the house. Schafer – who is now a co -owner of a Organic skin care line and works like a actor in Los Angeles – said she was in fifth year when she found herself to drive in the Mill Basin with her parents and a real estate broker. The family lived in Fort Lee, in New Jersey – another popular district for Russian -American – but they had friends in the Mill Basin, and his mother wanted to be closer. When the broker spent 2,458 National Drive, his father asked questions about it. Was it for sale? This was not the case. “My father was like:” Can we hit? ” And my father rang the door. The family opened the door and my father entered, and as a joke was: “Do you want to sell me your house?” “”

Listing photos show a main suite that plays Ivan’s room in Aorwhich includes the same furniture installed by the family that designed the room.
Photo: Bergen Basin Realty

Vasily Anisimov seemed to love that the house was sitting in a dead end, hidden behind the metal doors, its only exhibitions on the seafront. “There is no traffic,” said Schafer. “I think my father liked how isolated he was and how private it was.” Anisimov is now worth $ 1.6 billionaccording to Forbes. A former friend of Vladimir Putin (they were Judo Judo Partners), he came to control an unspecified aluminum aluminum slice, then went to real estate, with a wallet which once once numbered 37,000 acres and including land in an elite enclave in Aspen-ish where Putin friends Dachas built. Schafer has rented His father as a self-made man who mounted. And he clearly had a gift to make his way in the offers: the owners did Answer the door that day and went even further. “We ended up dinner there,” said Schafer. And she remembered coming back another day and sleeping inside the house while its owner was sleeping out – But not in the tents. “They had this beautiful boat,” she recalls.

Anna Schafer and her father, Vasily Anisimov. Photo: Stefanie Keenan / Getty Images; Images Mikhail Svetlov / Getty.

This owner was John Rosatti, A businessman born in Brooklyn with a jostling Return yachts. At one point, Rosatti had a Boat 162 feet long Large enough to contain six cabins, two Harley-Davidsons, two Vespas and a cigarette boat of $ 1 million. (He was appointed Remember whenafter the most famous line of Sopranos.) Is worth a 400 million dollars estimated Three years ago, Rosatti made money as an automotive dealer who founded the Plaza Auto Mall on Flatbush. (He also worked with a partner Who provided Donald Trump helicopters and helped to design his Trump brand limousine.) But Rosatti also had another life: he was found guilty of a crime for an attempt at auto theft and, later, for carrying a firearm as a criminal. Confidential informants appointed Him a man “made” in the Colombo Crime family, according to a report by a State Gaming Board, and Baltimore Sun cited a crime of anonymous “associated” colombo Who said Rosatti had a touch of touch like “a mentor with Russian gangsters who dominated the 1990s”. (Rosatti did not respond to a request for comments.)

Rosatti would have started building In 1989, and the parents of Schafer paid him $ 3 million for the house in 1996, asking him to put money entirely To set a trial on a deck he built on protected wetlands. “And that was that,” said Schafer. His parents provided the house but did not change much before 2003. It was then that her mother, Galina Anisimova, undertook a major project: adding a third floor and redoing interiors to her demanding standard.

A list photo shows the precise view that AorThe Ani is first of all the richness of the family when it passes through the double doors of the house in this large room. Marketing plans show the same views of the bay, the droplets chandeliers and the dramatic staircase that Anisimova designed with the help of designer Noel Jeffrey.
Photo: Bergen Basin Realty

Galina had a taste for the mirror and the marble, which was imported from Europe on the wall a main bathroom which opens in a cupboard without an appointment with personalized furniture. “It was like a palace, built in the early 2000s – they no longer even work like that,” said a family staff member who preferred to remain anonymous. Everything is personalized – the tile, the pocket doors, the wooden patterns and the innovative advantages are intelligently hidden, like a generator buried under a lawn and a room dedicated to cold storage of furs. Schafer remembers waking up in the huge primary suite of views of the bay and water sounds. The summer mornings, she ran down to jump on a ski jet, withdrawing her to meet friends. “It was not a terrible childhood,” she said. “It was very free.”

The family was registered after Schafer and his sister left the state when Schafer was in mid-Vingta. But the house of the Moulin Basin did not manage to sell itself quickly, and at each price cut, there were titles mocking its designIt is extravaganceIt is Connection with Rosatti. Galina told her daughter that her heart had broken the thought of the empty seated house. In 2018, it sold only $ 10 million to an LLC. These owners separated from the main house, selling it three years later For $ 7.2 million. A broker said Buyers were a family in the neighborhood who “wanted to upgrade”. In Variety,, Anora ‘director describe They like “a beautiful Russian American family” who was “proud of their house and who wanted them to be shown on the big screen”. (THE owner Baker congratulated but otherwise did not respond to a request for participation in this story.)

The film shot at home for two and a half weeks at the beginning of 2023 and used the naturally dramatic elements of the house, including the heavy metal doors (left) and the mirror walls that open to reveal the cupboards and the bathrooms.
Photo: Augusta Quirk / Anora Productions

Production designer Stephen Phelps Said he remembered having visited the house for the first time, which required “exploration”, given the scale. “There were so many parts that we did not even use,” he said. When Phelps and Baker discovered a garage with a mirror wall and white floors, they saw an easy way to broadcast extreme wealth by filling the luxury car rental room. A solarium with a round sitting area seemed that Ivan’s friends would choose to party. And a media room cheated like an office, where the family keeps important papers.

Phelps had settled his radar on what could feel good for a Russian family by spotting Baker around Brighton Beach and seeing what people really had. But to fill the rooms in the house, he and his sets decorator did not need to buy a lot. “I was able to recover and hunt throughout the manor.” Even some of the owner’s works of art, such as the paintings of surrealist figures and the statues of women, felt linked to the history of Baker. “The style and the choices that have been made in construction seem real,” said Phelps. “”They were made by people who have a similar type of context in this way. »»
To the real family who designed the house, see his house on the screen play a palace in a film that won the Palme d’Or in Cannes is a kind of end of fairy tale. “I’m happy for the house,” said Schafer. “It’s going to have his moment.”