In her young and promising career, Zhao has made flirting with boundaries a specialty. She was born in Beijing and attended boarding school in England before studying political science at Massachusetts’ Mount Holyoke College and filmmaking at New York University.
Despite a life spent mainly in cities, she’s been drawn intractably to the American heartland. After reading about the epidemic of teen suicides on Indian reservations, she packed up and drove from New York to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She stayed, on and off, for four years and made two films there: 2015′s “Songs My Brother Taught Me,” an affecting study of Lakota siblings, and the new “The Rider,” a lyrical, elegiac Western about a Lakota rodeo rider (Brady Jandreau) whose career is threatened by a head injury.