According to the jargon, you can be a vandweller or, more specifically, a workamper, which means that you travel around in your R.V. Most of them are of riper years, weathered by a steady-humored stoicism, and they’ve shrugged off the burden of property ownership in favor of what’s known as wheel estate. They may have been scathed by personal hardship, or spit out by the financial collapse of 2008. That is nonfiction, through and through: a deep delve, patiently researched, into the rising number of Americans for whom a stable existence is unaffordable. “Nomadland,” which won the main prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, is based on the 2017 book of the same name, by Jessica Bruder. Thus, Linda, a smiling and capable figure with silver hair, is played by Linda May Swankie, who has seven or eight months to live, and who hangs a skull and crossbones on the side of her van, is played by Swankie and so on. In the same vein, most of the folks in “Nomadland” are, as it were, true to themselves-genuine wanderers, recounting their experience as birds of passage, and radiating a singular blend of stringency and warmth. His sister, Lilly, who has Asperger’s, plays a version of herself. Brady, for instance, is played by a real-life rider, also named Brady, from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota, and his wound is no invention. She calls it Vanguard.Īnother takeaway from Zhao’s work: no land is more fertile than the border zone between documentary and fiction. Well, she does have a home, but it’s a white van that she has adapted, with lots of storage space, to be her only dwelling.

And now, at the start of “Nomadland,” which Zhao wrote and directed, we meet Fern ( Frances McDormand), who no longer has a husband, a regular job, or a home. As “ The Rider” (2018) gets under way, the hero-a young fellow named Brady-already has an angry gash in his head, having tumbled from his horse at a rodeo and taken a hoof to the skull.

One of the things we learn from the films of Chloé Zhao is this: bad luck is the stuff that happens before a story begins.

Book nomadland