The production spent a lot of time with the nomads to authentically capture how they live, even if some aspects of their lives are fictionalized. Linda May, who is prominently featured in Bruder’s book, plays cards with Fern while they do their laundry and discusses wanting to build an Earthship, while Charlene Swankie sends Fern a video once she achieves her goal of kayaking in Alaska. Other than Frances McDormand and David Strathairn - who plays another nomad named David - the rest of the cast are nonprofessional actors who actually live on the road. She doesn’t have much money and, at her age, there’s a slim chance of finding dependable work, so she joins a growing band of people who relocate throughout the year to obtain seasonal positions harvesting food, working in tourism, and responding to the holiday rush at Amazon’s warehouses. While Fern may not be a real person, the story of Empire is very much real.Īfter having her life shattered in her sixties, Fern starts residing in a van whose back section she’s repurposed into a small living space. But in December 2010, after ninety years of operation, her firm announced that demand had collapsed and that everyone in company-owned homes would have to move out by the end of the school year.

Yet it does surprisingly downplay how employers across the country take advantage of them.įern once lived in Empire, Nevada, a former company town built around a gypsum mine and drywall plant. Between capturing the relationships between these itinerant Americans and the beautiful landscapes they inhabit on their journeys, the film doesn’t shy away from pointing the finger at the financial crisis for the plight they face. The film provides an empathetic portrayal of these nomads.

As the director has put it, the character of Fern serves as a “guide” for the audience, bringing them into this unknown American world. While Chloé Zhao’s film is itself a work of fiction, she uses the book’s details to send a fictional central character named Fern (Frances McDormand) on a journey with real-life nomads straight from the text, placed in many of the same locations Bruder describes.

The film Nomadland, based on journalist Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, brings audiences into the world of people who live in their vans and campers while crisscrossing the continental United States picking up seasonal jobs. For some, there seemed to be no alternative but packing up everything and hitting the road - for good. Some of them had always struggled financially, while others had been secure until the Great Recession emptied their savings accounts and shattered their lives. In the aftermath of the 2008 housing crash, millions of Americans were unable to pay their mortgages.

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