“No, I’m not homeless. I’m just houseless. Not the same thing, right?" Questioning the notion of home and house, Nomadland tells the story of a sixty-year-old woman who loses everything during the great recession, leaving her hometown after the collapse of the sole industry that supported the rural settlement and the death of her husband. She decides consequently to embark on a journey and experience life as a modern-day nomad, setting off in her van through the vast landscape of the American West.
Exploring the idea of freedom but also of escapism, the movie relies on the grandeur of the sceneries, the weight of change and mobility, and the patience of the discovery to convey the narrative. Tackling the urban notion of settlement, Nomadland re-examines the link between our nomadic early days and the primary human instinct of survival through this Van-Dwelling experience. In fact, the nomad lifestyle, the oldest human subsistence method, is one of the consequences of infertile regions where movement is the most efficient method to find and exploit resources. In other words, a nomad is a person without fixed habitation or settled household, because the nature of his context urges him to stay on the move, to wonder, in order to live - still applicable to our modern days as highlighted in the movie.
