The big story of the start of the year was Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’s soulful follow-up to 2017 breakout The Rider. That film received a belated UK release in May, a month after Nomadland swept the board at the Oscars, taking best picture, director and actress.
Both films see the Chinese director immersing herself in a rural American subculture so seamlessly that one would assume she’s always been there, an outsider who chooses to listen first with patience and grace. A loose adaptation of Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book, it follows Fern (played by Frances McDormand), a widow whose home town has died, one of the many industrial fatalities of the 2008 recession. She’s been displaced (her town’s zip code was discontinued in 2011) and so decides to pack up, take her most important belongings with her in a van and go on the road.
The “houseless but not homeless” community that Fern encounters and slowly becomes a part of is one that, for many, will be fascinatingly new and in her process of revealing this…
