Chloe Zhao, the Chinese director reinventing US cinema
The Oscar-nominated director of Nomadland has cast the Western and the Road Movie in a new light. She s now revisiting the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Director Chloé Zhao gained fame for her film Nomadland
Chloé Zhao took the long road to Hollywood.
The Chinese-born director, whose film
Nomadland is the frontrunner for the 93rd Academy Awards this Sunday, had a very circuitous route to the top of the movie world.
Like Fern, the van-living nomad played by Frances McDormand in her new movie, Zhao s life has been marked by a wanderlust that has taken her from her birthplace in Beijing via London, New York, and the Badlands of Wyoming to Los Angeles, where she s now one of the most in-demand directors in show business.
Films on and as movement
The ground beneath Chloé Zhao’s feet grows slender wings and takes flight over barren landscapes, forever virginal to the movie audience’s eyes.
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The film begins with these lines about a horse Johnny is riding “If you are gonna keep on running your horse, you gonna break his spirit. You need to leave a little bit of the wild they are born with.
Express News Service
The ground beneath Chloé Zhao’s feet grows slender wings and takes flight over barren landscapes, forever virginal to the movie audience’s eyes. For in Zhao’s direction and editing, the movement turns lyrical and captures characters moments before they break inertia. In her recent Nomadland, a favourite in this muted awards season, Fern (Frances McDormand) collects the residues of her life to live houseless – she corrects someone in the film when they refer to her as homeless – after a countrywide economic downturn and more specifically, an
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First Man, Saturday, Channel 4, 9pm Following their successful 2016 musical collaboration La La Land, which netted 14 Academy Award nominations and six Oscars, director Damien Chazelle and actor Ryan Gosling teamed up again in 2018 for something completely different: an entirely dance-free biopic about legendary astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. Beginning in 1961 and running through to the iconic 1969 Apollo 11 mission which Armstrong commanded, First Man is a tense and intense piece of film-making which (as these things always do) underlines the achievement of the men and women of NASA and the bravery of the men who put their lives on the line for the sake of space exploration.
Nomadland, if not quite such a tight fit.
Songs My Brothers Taught Me is a slow-moving portrait of a Dakota reservation that, like Zhao’s subsequent work, is told through a sublime mixture of non-fiction naturalism (the cast are all non-professional) and poetic lyricism. If it lacks the gripping qualities of the later works (especially
Nomadland), it offers fantastic moments and eye-catching craft, and gives a rare authentic, empathetic insight into an under-represented community.
If
Nomadland is a road trip across America,
Songs My Brothers Taught Me is about characters resolutely stuck in one place. The heart of the story is the touchingly rendered relationship between high school senior Johnny (John Reddy) and his 12-year-old sister Jashaun (Jashaun St. John). Their bond is threatened when Johnny plans to leave for California with his girlfriend Aurelia (Taysha Fuller), who is going to college in Los Angeles.