Frances McDormand Stars as Modern Wanderer in ‘Nomadland’ Trailer

Searchlight Pictures has released the official trailer for Nomadland, the newest film from director Chloé Zhao (The Rider) that was awarded the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival. It is slated to be theatrically released in the United States on February 19th, 2021.

Based on Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book of the same name, Nomadland stars Frances McDormand as Fern, a woman in her sixties who loses everything during the Great Recession. With no future for her in the rural Nevada company town where she lives, Fern decides to embark on a nomadic life throughout the American West, living out of a van and taking work wherever she can find it. In the trailer, we see her taking a job at an Amazon warehouse, treating herself at a “Badlands spa” on the plains, and joining a camp of other nomads.

“I’m not homeless,” Fern explains to a teenage girl. “I’m just houseless. Not the same thing, right?”

Filming for Nomadland took place in the fall of 2018, between Zhao’s shoots for her upcoming Marvel film Eternals, and the movie stars real-life nomads Linda May, Swankie, and Bob Wells as Fern’s mentors. Additionally, McDormand, Zhao, and other crew members lived out of their own vans during the production.