Nomadland

Films

Feb 3

Although last weekend marked the end of the Cannes Film Festival, our first ever film post for today is Nomadland, the film that won Chloé Zhao the Academy Award for Best Director, making her the second woman and first woman of colour to do so.

Born in Beijing, Chloé went to school in Brighton and LA before deciding to study Politics at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. However, her time studying politics made her disillusioned with it, and she decided to take her passion of learning people’s stories to pursue filmmaking, her college minor. After doing the graduate programme on Film and Television at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Chloé directed her first two feature films, “Songs my Brother Taught Me” and “The Rider”, drawing on non-actors living on location to serve as crew.

For her third feature, Nomadland, Chloé also drew on non-actors to form her crew, having various real-life nomads in the film headed by actress Frances McDonald. The film is based on the book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century” by journalist Jessica Brouder, who spent months living in a second-hand van researching the many middle-class 60s and 70-something old Americans who took to RVs and vans after the recession left them unable to pay for a home. During her research, Jessica did not only follow the nomads and live in a van, but she also worked with them in the many seasonal jobs they took on to survive, such as factory work for large companies like Amazon.

For the film adaption, Chloé bases the film around Fern (played by McDonald) a widow who is forced to abandon her hometown of Empire, Nevada, after the sheetrock factory closes and leaves the town empty. During the film, Fern encounters several other nomads such as Swankie and Linda May, who were originally interviewed by Jessica for her book, and play fictionalised versions of themselves in the film. Chloé, who’s influences include Terrence Malick and Wong Kar-Wai, works with vast open scenery and lost faces gazing out of the void, including scenes from South Dakota’s Badlands to an actual outdoor nomad gathering known as the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous.

Through these small, poignant encounters, Chloé is able to capture the heart of this group of marginalized, zero-hours underclass, left with nothing but their own stoic choice to carry on. In her interview with Indie Wire, Chloé talked about how this can relate to what many of us have gone through in the pandemic: “In the past several months, we’ve all gone through a version of what Fern has felt — this feeling of great loss to a life that you used to have. It’s just this void you feel, the need to go back to normal, which leads to acceptance and how you can grow to ultimately feel OK with your place in the world. That’s what a lot of people need right now.”

Sources

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/11/nomadland-review-frances-mcdormand-chloe-zhao

https://time.com/5938982/nomadland-true-story/

https://www.ft.com/content/481f8c31-9858-44e6-879b-45ce7a2d8774