Free Republic

Chloé Zhao used to say she sometimes forgot she was Asian...When she was growing up in Beijing in the 1980s and ’90s, being Chinese was simply the context in which she and everyone around her existed. A few border crossings and two decades later, she would find her way to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota — where she would eventually make her generation’s best film about the American West. She met Lakota cowboy Brady Jandreau when he was working at a ranch and cast him in The Rider as Brady Blackburn, an injured rodeo star who struggles...

“I thought my last film was hard,” Zhao laughs, “but for a Chinese woman to try to wrangle a bunch of young cowboys?” Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao is making her second trip to the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight this year, with sophomore feature The Rider. Born in Beijing, Zhao went to school in the UK and college in the U.S. before settling in Denver, basing her first two feature films on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Zhao’s 2015 drama, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, was developed at the Sundance Institute and premiered in Park City that year. It centers...