Nomadland

Hamnet director Chloe Zhao picked up one of three Academy Awards (along with Best Picture and Best Actress) in 2021 for this unconventional, compassionate adaptation of Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. Like the book, the film is a portrait of the rootless working class, drifting from job to job across the USA. Frances McDormand (who also produced) is Fran, who finds in this lifestyle a new community and even a whisper of freedom. Zhao surrounded her with real-life nomads, and the movie has an authenticity and naturalism unusual in mainstream American cinema.

This screening is in our latest Film Studies series on literary Adaptations, led by Patricia Gruben, who will give a 15-minute introduction.

Patricia Gruben is a filmmaker and former associate professor of film at Simon Fraser University, as well as founder and long-time director of Praxis Centre for Screenwriters (now the Screenwriters Lab at the Whistler Film Festival.) Her films have been screened at TIFF, VIFF, Sundance and the New York Film Festival, and her writing on film has appeared in international academic and popular journals. Her latest film was Heart of Gold.

A powerful character study… Nomadland is an unassuming film, its aptly meandering, unhurried non-narrative layering impressions rather than building a story with the standard markers. But the cumulative effect of its many quiet, seemingly inconsequential encounters and moments of solitary contemplation is a unique portrait of outsider existence.

David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

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.

AO Scott, New York Times