Free Republic

After last year marked the first Super Bowl without a Budweiser ad in 37 years, the iconic beer brand is returning with a new commercial directed by Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao and featuring its staple Clydesdale horse. The 1-minute long commercial doesn't have any dialogue, yet it tells the emotional story about a Clydesdale that is seriously injured while jumping over a barbed-wire fence. Viewers are led to believe that the horse may never walk again, only for the Clydesdale to come back galloping in full stride as it's chased by a canine friend. "In the home of the brave, down...

Chloé Zhao used to say she sometimes forgot she was Asian...When she was growing up in Beijing in the 1980s and ’90s, being Chinese was simply the context in which she and everyone around her existed. A few border crossings and two decades later, she would find her way to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota — where she would eventually make her generation’s best film about the American West. She met Lakota cowboy Brady Jandreau when he was working at a ranch and cast him in The Rider as Brady Blackburn, an injured rodeo star who struggles...

Chloé Zhao’s history-making Oscars sweep, winning best director and best picture, is being met with a muted response in her country of birth, and even censorship. Zhao’s “Nomadland” is the second film directed by a woman to win a best picture Oscar. She is the first woman of color and second woman ever to win the Oscars for best director. Yet, in China, where Zhao was born, her history-making success has not been trumpeted or celebrated. State media in China remained silent as of Monday afternoon, with no mention of her win by either CCTV and Xinhua, the two main...

<p>Zhao won the Oscar for best director for “Nomadland,” becoming just the second woman and the first woman of color to win the award.</p><p>Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to win, for “The Hurt Locker,” in 2009.</p><p>This was the only year in Oscar history with two female nominees, Zhao and “Promising Young Woman” director Emerald Fennell. Only seven women have ever been nominated.</p>

“I thought my last film was hard,” Zhao laughs, “but for a Chinese woman to try to wrangle a bunch of young cowboys?” Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao is making her second trip to the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight this year, with sophomore feature The Rider. Born in Beijing, Zhao went to school in the UK and college in the U.S. before settling in Denver, basing her first two feature films on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Zhao’s 2015 drama, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, was developed at the Sundance Institute and premiered in Park City that year. It centers...