Film
The Rider
- Director
- Chloé Zhao
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 103 mins
Just when you thought you’d seen every conceivable variation on the modern-day western, Chinese-American director Chloé Zhao‘s equally acclaimed follow-up to her Camera d’Or-nominated debut Songs My Brother Taught Me gallops onto the screen.
Set in the Pine Ridge reservation, North Dakota, it’s the fictionalised true story of a rodeo rider whose promising career is cut short when he suffers a catastrophic head injury at the hooves of a nag. Now life will be a struggle for his family, who relied upon his earnings to get by. Non-professional actor Brady Jandreau, who suffered a similar real-life accident, is cast in the lead role, with friends and members of his family playing versions of themselves. Reviews were uniformly positive when the film was premiered at Cannes last year. “The Rider reinvigorates tropes from the western genre of men, horses, honour codes and vast expanses of natrue with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, without sacrificing their inherent lyricism and poetry,” enthused the Washington Post.
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