The Rider

Chloé Zhao's second film, which removes the line between the real and the invented. Brady is a rodeo rider. He is thrown at a competition, fractures his skull, and the doctors tell him he must never ride again. The film follows what comes after: not being able to ride, not being able to find work, having the only thing he defines himself by taken away. All of this is real. Brady Jandreau was a rodeo rider, and in April 2016 at a competition in Fargo his foot caught in the stirrup and he was swung under the horse, suffering skull and brain injuries. Zhao began filming him and the people around him shortly afterwards. Nobody in the film is a professional actor. Brady plays himself; his father Tim and his sister Lilly play themselves. Most of his friends in it are real too. It is set on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, and the landscape is one of its main materials. The horse training is not staged; Brady really is breaking wild horses in front of the camera, and those passages are the film's strongest. An important work for anyone who loves quiet, patient, realist cinema. For a viewer wanting incident, it is almost entirely a man wrestling with a decision.