NOMADLAND, Chloé Zhao (2021) / When home collapses, look for home on the road

NOTE TO FIRST-TIMERS: This event is not a screening of the film. This event is our regular Saturday night group Zoom conversation on the film, after you've streamed or rented and watched it on your own during the week. Check out the HOW THIS WORKS section below. We look forward to having you join us!

ABOUT THE FILM
Following the economic collapse of a company town in the Nevada desert, the death of her husband, and the loss of most of what she owns, 60-something Fern (Frances McDormand) puts her belongings in storage, packs her van, and sets off on the road exploring a life outside of conventional society as a modern-day nomad, traveling across the vast landscape of the American West. She navigates the hardships of living on the road, including extreme weather, odd jobs, and loneliness. A group of fellow nomads she meets along the way share their stories and experiences with her, including Linda May (a real-life nomad playing herself) and Dave (David Strathairn), who nominates himself to be Fern's love interest, to no avail.

The movie tackles issues related to the growing number of people left behind by our modern American economy. Neither victims nor losers, nomads' simple, independent lifestyle is theirs partly from necessity, partly by choice, and it challenges traditional notions of success and happiness. The stunning cinematography captures the rugged beauty of the American West, from vast deserts to snow-capped mountains. Nomadland is a poignant and introspective exploration of the human spirit, resilience, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world.

Written, directed, and edited by Chloé Zhou
Based on the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder
Produced by Zhou, McDormand, Peter Spears, Mollye Asher, and Dan Janvey
Cinematography: Joshua James Richards
Music: Ludovico Einaudi
Release dates: 11 September 2020 (Venice Film Festival), 19 February 2021 (U.S.)
Running time: 1h 48m

HOW THIS WORKS
Rent or stream Nomadland and view it during the week. (Find out where to do that on [[JustWatch.com](http://justwatch.com/)](http://justwatch.com/) or TV.Movie.) Give us your RSVP, then join us for conversation this Saturday 3/21 at 7:20p. A Zoom link for that conversation will appear on the upper right of this page once you RSVP. First-timers must sign up by Friday 3/20 in order to ensure being admitted.

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TRAILER, RATINGS, EXTRAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sxCFZ8_d84

Rotten Tomatoes: Tomatometer 93% based on 440 reviews
Metacritic: 87 (universal acclaim) based on 57 reviews, "Must See"

Nomadland took home the Golden Lion at the 2020 77th Venice International Film Festival and the People's Choice Award at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, making it the first film to win the top prize at those two festivals in the same year.

Its list of Best Picture awards won is long. It includes ...
Best Motion Picture – Drama, 78th Golden Globe Awards
Best Film, 74th British Film Academy Awards
Best Film, 36th Independent Spirit Awards
Best Picture, 93rd Academy Awards
In addition, Zhou captured the Oscar for Best Director, the second woman so awarded, and McDormand garnered her third Academy Award for Best Actress.

Producers-to-be McDormand and Spears optioned the film rights to Bruder's book in 2017. After seeing Zhao's film The Rider at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, McDormand decided to approach her about directing the project. She and Spears met with Zhao at the 33rd Independent Spirit Awards in March 2018, and Zhao agreed to write and direct the film.

McDormand, Zhao, and other crew members lived out of vans for four months over the course of production. Zhao, a lifelong manga fan, named hers Akira.

Zhao’s script evolved with the non-professional nomad actors they cast. Producers would arrive on location in advance of the shoot to record iPhone videos with possible characters, then send them to Zhao so she could work on her revisions.

Zhao was able to shoot the low-budget Nomadland while simultaneously working pre-production on her film Eternals, a blockbuster iteration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise.

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BLURBS & ATTITUDES
Nomadland finds poetry in the story of a seemingly average woman. It's a gorgeous film that’s alternately dreamlike in the way it captures the beauty of this country and grounded in its story about the kind of person we don’t usually see in movies. I love everything about it. ∞ Brian Tallerico, *RogerEbert.com*

It's hard to picture any actress other than McDormand in the part. She doesn't just become Fern, she creates her, melding Zhao's screenplay to her own fierce character in a way that feels almost uncannily real. Together, they've managed to make that rare thing: a film that feels both necessary and sublime. ∞ Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

There is no transcendence at the end of Fern's long, harrowing journey, but there are unexpected gifts, guardian angels and places of refuge. It would be hard to overlook the spiritual presence — a good word for it would be “grace” — that hovers over every frame of this movie and the spare, wrenching story it has to tell. ∞ Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

The sheer compassion of Zhao's direction is one of the film's most elemental pleasures, while McDormand is one of those rare actors who can somehow make the act of listening as thrilling as a barnstorming speech. ∞ Robbie Collin, The Telegraph

It’s a piercing look into a country that’s becoming less and less inhabitable for its older men and women, and more stingy about who gets to dream. And, fundamentally, it’s a poignant portrait of a broken heart. ∞ Alissa Wilkinson, Vox

To some degree, Nomadland wishes to be settled — wants not necessarily to domesticate its heroine, but at least to bend her journey into a more-or-less predictable arc. At the same time, and in a fine Emersonian spirit, the movie rebels against its own conventional impulses, gravitating toward an idea of experience that is more complicated, more open-ended, more contradictory than what most American movies are willing to permit. The nomad existence is at once an acknowledgment of human impermanence and a protest against it .... It’s hard to describe the mixture of sadness, wonder and gratitude that you feel in the company of Fern and her friends, and through her eyes and ears. It’s like discovering a new country, one you may want to visit more than once. ∞ A.O. Scott, New York Times

A portrait of America that is devastating and freeing, bursting with sorrow and empathy. ∞ Barry Hertz, Toronto Globe and Mail

Fern’s need for constant movement McDormand implies, in a performance of extraordinary depth and ambiguity, is both a search for something and an escape from something else, and not even she seems completely sure what either something is. ∞ Dana Stevens, Slate

If you miss this film, you are robbing yourself of one of the great movie-watching experiences of your life. ∞ Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times

Nomadland balances with spine-tingling grace between respect for such restlessness of spirit and longing for a society that has any notion of how to care for it. ∞ Ty Burr, Boston Globe

Nomadland is the kind of big and big-hearted movie — featuring a central performance at once epic and fine-tuned — that reminds you of how much life one film can hold, when circumstances allow. ∞ Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

Zhao is expert at stitching together realism, moments of sheer transcendence and a lightly-worn radicalism in a way that feels nothing but unpatronising and empathetic. ∞ Phil de Semlyan, Time Out

Zhao collaborates with a major-name actor for the first time in Nomadland, guiding Frances McDormand to a remarkable performance of melancholy gravitas, so rigorously unmannered she's indistinguishable from the real-life nomads with whom she shares the screen. ∞ David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

A wise, beautiful film summoned up entirely from things authentically seen, felt, and thought. ∞ Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

By juxtaposing beautiful vistas filled with promise, a rotted social safety net, and the scrappy itinerant workers navigating the space in between, Zhao generates a gradually swelling tension underneath her film’s somewhat placid surface. ∞ Chris Barsanti, Slant

While there’s little or no outright expression of religious faith in Nomadland, Zhao and company have given us a glancing but evocative state-of-the-nation character study. In its own spiritual fashion, Fern’s story becomes one about the character of a nation, and an America desperately searching for the ribbon of highway (to quote Woody Guthrie) to take us all the way home. ∞ Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune