Frances McDormand will star in and produce Beyond Nomadland: The Workampers Strike Back, a surprise sequel to the award-winning film Nomadland. The new project, described as Norma Rae meets The Hunger Games, was inspired by the recent Book Workers Day of Solidarity with Amazon workers organizing to form a union in Bessemer, Ala., as well as Raven Book Store owner Danny Caine's manifesto How to Resist Amazon and Why.
McDormand said her sympathies were fully with Amazon's workers, and she wanted to more deeply explore their issues through the new film, which is currently in early development stages as a Joel and Ethan Coen project.
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| McDormand as Fern in Nomadland. (photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures) |
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The movie is also in part a response to questions raised regarding Nomadland's relatively humane depiction of Amazon fulfillment center working conditions, which contrasted markedly with the book from which it was adapted, Jessica Bruder's Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century.
Set in the not-too-distant future, Beyond Nomadland will explore these issues with a Coen brothers twist. In a brief statement, the Coens said: "We hope to perform a little cinematic surgery on Jeff Bezos's dark heart."