CHLOÉ ZHAO
Profile and on the set of Nomadland
This could be a big year for women at the Oscars. Specifically for women who directed feature films. One of the women who’s been getting a lot of buzz is Chloé Zhao for her upcoming film Nomadland. While the movie is not currently available for the general public—it is scheduled for a February 19, 2021 release—advance screeners have been made available to many in the press and different media outlets. Additionally, lucky viewers may have already gotten the chance to see it when it screened at last year’s Venice Film Festival, or Toronto International Film Festival (it won the top prize at both festivals), or during its week-long virtual release in early December. Nomadland centers around a woman named Fern (Frances McDormand), who, after losing her husband and her job, sells off her belongings and treks out across the American west in search of seasonal work, living out of her van. Along the way, she meets many other modern-day nomads.
Zhao first rose to prominence with her feature film debut Songs My Brother Taught Me, which premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The movie is set in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and follows the relationship between a Lakota Sioux brother and his younger sister. Her follow-up film, The Rider, was also set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Both films were notable for how Zhao built up a relationship with the Lakota community in order to make a scripted film based on real people. Her seamless blending of documentary-like realism with scripted drama carried over into her making of Nomadland as well.
Zhao based the film on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, which explores older American workers, affected by the Great Recession, who spend their lives travelling for temporary work. McDormand, who produced the movie along with Zhao, is one of only two professional actors in the nomadic cast, the other being David Strathairn. The rest of the main cast are played by real-life nomads who play a version of themselves. Zhao shot Nomadland over four months in 2018, with herself, McDormand, and the rest of the crew living out of their own vans while in production.
Now, in a big departure from her small-scale, deeply human, dramas, Zhao is currently in post-production on a very different kind of film. The upcoming Marvel superhero movie Eternals, which will follow an immortal alien race who live secretly on Earth as they reunite to protect the fate of humanity. Eternals has gained early buzz for being the first Marvel movie to feature a gay main character, who will be played by Brian Tyree Henry. The movie has an insane cast that includes Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Salma Hayek, Kit Harrington, and Gemma Chan. It is scheduled to come out on November 5, 2021.
