In her two previous features, Songs My Brother Taught Me and The Rider, Chloé Zhao established a spiritual connection to the American West, with its immense skies and wide-open landscapes that speak equally of desolate solitude and of freedom.
Working primarily with nonprofessional actors playing versions of themselves, she specializes in stories carved into the bones of her characters, their communities and the remotes spaces they inhabit.
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.
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