“There are times that we don’t feel comfortable showing one of those.”

“There’s a feminine and a masculine side to everyone,” Zhao said. “The Rider” depicts the process of waking up to the wider world for the first time. The simplicity of his milieu has made it easy to ignore the big questions. Zhao burrows into that aspect of Brady’s struggle to reveal a man coming to grips with emotions he’s suppressed his whole life. In his insular world of yawning skies and windswept fields, divorced from politics, the endless cascade of media and technology, the idea of retiring from his field comes like a death sentence.

The movie presents its sweeping, empty landscapes and wistful characters as hovering in a perpetual state of melancholy, as Brady contends with the possibility that he must turn his back on horseback riding for good.

“I think ‘The Rider’ became the type of film it is because of a man and a woman, because the two of us wanted to work together and understand where we were coming from,” Zhao said. Above all, the movie represents a kind of collaboration at odds with the current historical moment-largely thanks to the performance Zhao extracted from her star, Jandreau. She may be a long shot for Best Director in this year’s Oscar race, but the degree of admiration she found from contemporaries supersedes the value of any potential trophies. To that end, Zhao has become the ultimate cause celebre of the film community, and “The Rider” provides an antidote to Trumpian ignorance even if its existence predated the concept. This has been a crucial aspect of “The Rider” that has allowed it to linger as a critical favorite in year-end discussions some 18 months after it first generated heat: As America reels from one of the most divisive chapters in its history, and artistic communities recede to cosmopolitan bubbles, one of the year’s most celebrated breakouts presents an unorthodox collision of worlds - a Chinese immigrant sets her gaze on the nation’s oldest genre, and finds renewed intimacy in its depths. “I was very nervous because I wasn’t sure how people would react to someone in a cowboy hat.” “We made this film without anybody knowing about it,” she said in a phone interview. So much has happened that Zhao, who grew up in Beijing and moved to the U.S.

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