The Rider

Director: Chloe Zhao

2017 / 104min / DCP

Beijing-born Nomadland director Zhao’s breakthrough docufiction, shot among the Lakota Sioux residents of South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, has its nonprofessional rodeo rider cast playing subjects whose lives (and injuries) mirror their own, with Brady Jandreau—who Zhao first encountered shooting her first film, Songs My Brother Taught Me—giving a performance of rare simplicity and veracity as an ex-champ and horse trainer forced to put his days of arena competition behind him following a near-death experience with a bucking horse. A lyrical, compassionate portrait of a tight-knit community depicted with disarming intimacy, and a compelling tale of the struggle between one man’s still-eager mind and compromised body.