Nomadland, the recession-era retirees study starring Frances McDormand, has won the Toronto film festival people’s choice award, adding the influential prize to the Venice Golden Lion it was awarded a week ago.
Nomadland, inspired by Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, dramatises the experiences of a generation affected by the 2008 recession who can no longer afford either to retire or a permanent home.
Michelle Latimer’s Inconvenient Indian, drawn from Thomas King’s book of the same title about the cultural colonisation of indigenous Americans, won the documentary people’s choice award, while Shadow in the Cloud, a horror movie featuring Chloë Grace Moretz trapped in a second world war plane, won the Midnight Madness people’s choice.
It has attracted glowing notices across the board: in a five-star review, the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “a gentle, compassionate, questioning film about the American soul”, while EW’s Leah Greenblatt described it as “a film that feels both necessary and sublime”.