the women we study: chloé zhao
before chloé zhao won the academy award for best director, she was already practicing a rarer form of authority: the willingness to see without imposing. born in beijing in 1982, zhao preferred western films and manga to schoolwork. at fifteen, her parents sent her to boarding school in england, where she spoke almost no english. unable to rely on language, she learned to read gesture, silence, and the distance between what people say and what they mean.
she studied political science at mount holyoke, then film at nyu under spike lee. but the sensibility defining her work — patience with landscape and the interior lives of people at society's margins — came from somewhere older: wong kar-wai's emotional precision and the classical chinese texts she memorized with her father as a child.
her first two features, songs my brothers taught me (2015) and the rider (2017), were shot in south dakota with non-actors playing versions of themselves — lakota siblings on pine ridge, a cowboy confronting the injury that ended his career. both premiered at cannes. what made them distinctive was not their setting but their refusal to romanticize it. the american west has long served as the country's origin myth — self-reliance, open land, reinvention. zhao found the reality underneath: poverty, broken bodies, lives shaped less by freedom than by the economics of survival.
nomadland (2020) made that tension explicit. retirement-age americans in vans chasing seasonal work were not free spirits on the open road. they were middle-class people displaced by recession, priced out of housing, discovering that the country's romance with mobility conceals a failure to provide for its own. it swept the 2021 academy awards — best picture, best director, best actress.
her 2025 film, hamnet, shifted to sixteenth-century england but kept the same preoccupation: what is sacrificed in the margins of larger narratives. it earned eight oscar nominations including best picture and director.
"i have always been an outsider myself. i'm attracted to people who are on the periphery of society."
modern reflection
zhao's work maps the distance between the stories a country tells about itself and the lives people actually lead. the cowboy who can no longer ride. the retiree in a van because retirement as promised no longer exists. the wife whose grief disappears inside her husband's legacy. she made not belonging into a form of seeing — and proved that the truth of a place lives not in its mythology, but in the stories it never intended to tell.
