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If you take home the Golden Lion, the top prize awarded at the Venice Film Festival, you’re generally doing something right.

US-based Chinese director Chloé Zhao will be delighted with the award, given for Nomadland, which is a “documentary-influenced road movie starring Frances McDormand as an itinerant widow travelling across America”.

In winning the award, Zhao becomes the female filmmaker to take Venice’s top prize since 2010, reports Variety. That time around, Sofia Coppola triumphed with Somewhere.

The only trailer released thus far is a teaser trailer of sorts:

We can’t glean much from that, but let’s check out the Guardian’s five-star review:

The movie is inspired by Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, and by the radical nomadist and anti-capitalist leader Bob Wells, who appears as himself and has a devastatingly moving speech at the end of the film.

McDormand stars as Fern, a widow and former substitute teacher in Empire, Nevada – a town wiped off the map by a factory closure – who is forced into piling some possessions into a tatty van and heading off, something she accepts with an absolute lack of self-pity…McDormand is a marvellous diplomat for this creative process.

The review calls McDormand’s on-screen presence “the performance of her career”, heaps praise on Zhao, and calls the film “a gentle, compassionate, questioning film about the American soul”.

At some point in December, when the film is released, we can see what all the fuss is about ourselves.

[sources:variety&guardian]