2020 is mercifully drawing down. Here at The Kitchen Sisters we have a tradition of creating a radio special based on the themes we’ve been chasing across the year.
Our host for the Special, The Keepers: Archiving the Now, is the Academy Award-winning actor and producer, Frances McDormand. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; Olive Kitteridge; Fargo… Fran is nothing but the truth.
In this same moment, Frances has an extraordinary new film coming out, Nomadland, directed by Chloe Zhao, centered on the very now many Americans find themselves in. People uprooted from their old jobs and neighborhoods, places they’ve called home for decades, now living in DIY customized vans, migrating for work with the seasons. Christmas near the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Virginia, the sugar beet harvest in North Dakota, cleaning latrines and being Campground Hosts in National Parks.
They were already on the road by the thousands before the pandemic uprooted even more of us.
After we recorded Frances’ narration for the Special, we sat and talked about the film she stars in and co-produced, which begins its journey into the public realm this week, in that strange way movies open in the midst of lockdown, a pandemic, re-counts…
Today, The Kitchen Sisters Present… Frances McDormand in Nomadland.
Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) in collaboration with Fletch Fletcher, Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. Mixed by Jim McKee. Our thanks to Chloe Zhao, Jessica Bruder, Ludovico Einaudi, Barry Johnson & Jacquelyn Silverman and Searchlight Pictures, Simon Halls, Tom Luddy & Julie Huntsinger and the Telluride Film Festival, The New York Film Festival, The Toronto Film Festival, C-Span and Bob Wells’ YouTube Channel CheapRVLiving. Special thanks to Frances McDormand.
Nomadland opens for a virtual week now and theatrically in February.
Funding for our stories comes from PRX, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Endowment for the Arts — Art Works, The Robert Sillins Family Foundation and listener contributions to The Kitchen Sisters Productions.
The Kitchen Sisters Present… is part of the Radiotopia | PRX podcast network.
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Thanks for listening. Stay safe. Stay steady. We’re in this together.
