CHLOÉ ZHAO
Writer-director
OJAI, CALIFORNIA
Chloé Zhao began 2018 by winning the inaugural Bonnie Award — a prize for midcareer female filmmakers that comes with a $50,000 grant — at the Independent Spirit Awards and ended it with the National Society of Film Critics voting her indie drama The Rider as the year’s Best Picture.
In between those two milestones,, her stylistically audacious and emotionally wrenching drama-documentary hybrid about Brady Jandreau (played, in a bold stroke of casting, by Brady Jandreau), a Lakota cowboy and rodeo competitor who’s forced to consider the potentially fatal consequences of pursuing his career after a bucking horse stomps on his head during a mishap at the 2016 PRCA rodeo in Fargo, North Dakota.
