When Chloé Zhao received the Golden Globe for Best Director at the end of February, she was only the second woman to be awarded in this category in 78 years of history. The 38-year-old Beijing-born filmmaker has thus become a hope not only for filmmakers with Asian roots, but also for filmmakers, who have been systematically overlooked in the industry for decades.
Peripheral communities
Her third feature film, The Land of Nomads, premiered last year in Venice, where it won the Golden Lion, and subsequently collected almost all the awards it could. He thus became a hot candidate for the Oscars, whose nominations we will know on March 15.
In the story of Fern (Frances McDormand), a widowed quirky man in her sixties, whose home becomes a ghost town after the local mines close, and she sets out with her minivan on a journey across the American Midwest, Zhao builds on her previous work. Both her debut Song My Brother Thought Me (2015) and her second film The Rider (2017) take place in overlooked communities and give space to actors who play themselves to some degree. She made both films on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and focuses on the fates of the Native Americans.
Thousands of people in America have been caught up in the four-wheelers by economic crisis. The minivan is the only alternative to homelessness or living in an unsuitable location and conditions.
It was after watching the Rider (awarded in Cannes) that Frances McDormand decided to address Zhao with an offer to film Jessica Bruder’s book. The journalist Bruder herself traveled in a trailer around the United States and worked as a wage force to collect material on modern nomads, and then wrote her experiences in the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century.
McDormand acquired the rights to film the book with Peter Spears, the producer of the fragile romance Give Me Your Name (2017), and Zhao gave them complete creative freedom: she is the author of the screenplay, the director and the editor. Like Bruder, Zhao, along with McDormand and the staff, traveled among the nomads and spent several months with them. Zhao then combined the non-fiction of the model with the fictional story of the character Fern, which we follow from the moment he says goodbye to all his belongings and the city (it’s a real, 2011 defunct city of Empire in Nevada), where she lived most of her life. which becomes her new home.
A situation they did not choose
So Fern is as new to the nomadic lifestyle as Bruder was, while the real protagonists of the book, such as Linda May, Swankie or the well-known nomadicist Bob Wells, we meet here as Fern’s guides who help her along the way – whether in seasonal work in the warehouse. Amazon, the issue of dry toilets, changing a flat tire or coping with the loss of a loved one.
None of them voluntarily chose this life. Thousands of people in America have been caught up in the four-wheelers by economic crisis. People in their sixties and seventies, and especially women after a divorce or the loss of a partner, often find themselves in a situation where they cannot afford to pay rent. The minivan is then the only alternative to homelessness or living in an unsuitable location and conditions.
Fern, who has lived all her life in one place, suddenly recognizes America with many faces. Monotonous manual work is alternated by scenes of monumental natural phenomena, which arouse amazement, find peace in them or get lost in them. She meets new friends, experiences the unprecedented solidarity of people with similar destinies as hers. The sense of belonging and community alternates with loneliness and isolation along the way.
Without trials, absences and great dramas
The land of nomads is like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath for the 21st century, but it is also a celebration of the freedom that nomadism gives people for whom a peaceful retirement without financial worries is an unattainable dream. Chloé Zhao’s semi-documentary, pathos-free style, and Frances McDormand’s focused performance, which impressed Fern with not only tenacity but also touching fragility and pain, make the film an exceptionally empathetic work. One of the strongest moments is the scene in which Fern struggles to glue a porcelain plate to his father – one of the few things that connects her to a past that has disappeared forever.
Zhao combines lyricism with sympathetic unpretentiousness and a sense of authentic everyday life, made possible by the fact that she really spent time with people that society forgets. This created an exceptional film without trials, solutions and great dramas, sensitively telling about the need for a home, its loss and the search for alternatives in a time of ongoing crisis and uncertainty.
The author works in film marketing and dramaturgy.
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