grounds

We’ve already written more generally about how director and writer Chloé Zhao used documentary techniques to blur real life and fiction in her neo-western drama Nomadland, which is now available to stream on Hulu. One of the chief filmmaking choices Zhao made was to utilize non-actors to play fictionalized versions of themselves. Characters like Linda May and Swankie are played by real-life nomads who live in their vans. Bob Wells, a vlogger and author who writes about life lived in his refurbished van, is the most famous of the actual nomads to appear in Nomadland. Wells is an older American…