Fox Searchlight has released the first images from Nomadland, Chloe Zhao’s follow up to her acclaimed 2018 film The Rider. The movie marks the first film for Frances McDormand coming off her second Oscar win for Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri and has her playing “Fern, a woman in her sixties, who after losing everything in the Great Recession embarks on a journey through the American West, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad.” The road movie will also, like The Rider, feature real people turned actors, in this case co-stars Linda May and Charlene Swankie. The film is based on the non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, which McDormand and Peter Spears optioned soon after it was published in 2017.
If you’ve seen The Rider, you know Zhao is a talent worth watching, and while she’s signed on to direct Marvel’s The Eternals, I’m glad that she’s still making smaller films, especially one that looks as timely as Nomadland. With Fox Searchlight distributing the picture, it will be interesting to see if it’s a player in 2019’s awards race or if Zhao will work on it until 2020.
Check out the first images below along with the press release:
via Collider