Over a period of tensions between the United States and China, a sign of relaxation seems to emerge from the night of the 2021 Oscars: the come award best director for the Chinese Chloé Zhao in fact, everyone agrees.
Born in Beijing, studied in Europe and the USA, yes graduated in film with Spike Lee and speaks a little Italian: Chloé Zhao, director of Nomadland, made history by becoming the first Chinese director, the first Asian and the second woman to win the Oscar for best director.
Taken from the essay by Jessica brother, Nomadland tells what remains of the American dream in the United States today in which the bourgeois of yesterday are the new poor, who cannot afford a home and therefore nomads looking for occasional jobs, forced to choose between health insurance and food.
The film, which has already won two Golden Globes and a Golden Lion, is played by professional actors, as the protagonist Oscar award Frances McDormand and David Strathairn, and by non-professionals, such as nomads Linda May, Swankie and Bob Wells. For Zhao this is nothing new: even his two films before Nomadland, Songs My Brothers Taught Me e The Rider, I’m dramas set in the western United States with non-professional actors but people who interpret themselves and their real life.
Because Zhao is interested in capturing life as well as, transforming it into narration and images, with the aim of to save in memory people and places that are disappearing, or have already disappeared, swallowed up by the evolution of consumer civilization. His films are all set in the United States, and tell the difficulties of the daily life of marginalized by society, of the excluded.
“I have been thinking a lot lately about how I can move forward when things get tough,” Zhao said in his Oscar thank you speech. “I think it has to do with my childhood. As a child, in China, my father and I used to play memorizing poems and classical Chinese texts, reciting them together. There is one that begins with: ‘People at birth are inherently good‘, words that had such a great impact on me when I was a child, that I still truly believe in them today. While it may seem otherwise at times, I have always found goodness in the people I have met, wherever I went in the world. “
World that Zhao has toured a lot. Born in Beijing, he had a difficult relationship with his country of origin, especially since a 2013 interview resurfaced in which he claimed there were “lies everywhere”. The claim sparked the reaction of the Chinese authorities to the exit of Nomadland in the country, however, after the announcement of the Oscar win, on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo the praises of the director fell.
Zaho soon left China for Europe. He attended high school in the UK, and it also has a link with Italy, whose language he speaks a little, represented by Roberto Baggio: “It was my myth,” recently told a Republic, “I looked at him at the World Cup and asked: who is that boy with the pigtail? His suffering conquered me ”.
After high school he moved to the United States to study political science, but politics did not conquer him, and so he found work in a bar and other casual jobs. Thanks to those experiences he discovered passion for the lives of others, the pleasure of “meet people and learn their stories“, as he told Filmmaker Magazine. Hence the decision to study film at New University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she enrolled in 2010 and has studied with Spike Lee.
“What I like about Spike is that he doesn’t do anything silly, he just says things as they are and I really needed it at the time. We had very heated discussions, so much so that sometimes his assistant had to come into the classroom to check that it was. all right. But it was a very fun time. “
Today, at 39, Chloé Zhao is making her third feature film. Nomadland in the US it was released on February 19, 2021, while we will hit the big screen in May and April 30 on Disney + Star. His next project is The Eternals, the highly anticipated Marvel movie for two hundred million dollars for production alone.
