Nomadland/ 2020

Produced in 2020 and winner of many prizes, Nomadland is a successful film by the director Chloé Zhao. Having been adapted to the screen from the book by journalist Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, the film is a semi-documentary where some of the actors and actresses live in “RVs” and act as themselves.

61-year-old Fern, performed by the lead actress Frances McDormand, lives with her husband, whose illness and death we learn about later, in a small industrial town called Empire in America. Production ceases in the town where she dwells, like in many places, as a result of the big economic crisis happening at the beginning of the 2000s. Employees become unemployed, and their residences turn into ghost towns. Fern loses almost everything she has, primarily her house and her husband. She buys an RV and is obliged to hit the road as a modern nomad. She calls herself “without a home” but not “homeless” and struggles to survive while mourning. She encounters the cruelest side of capitalism but also people with whom she shares poetic moments.

The film, which draws the portrait of many people suffering from the global economic crisis, lets the audience see life from the perspective of mid-life poor people who are obliged to work in precarious jobs and live in RVs. It leads the audience, especially architects to think about the meaning of shelter, the difference between home and house, the importance of place in our existence, and the relation of belonging that we establish with our stuff, place, and space.