Who is Chloe Zhao? Second woman to win Best Director at Golden Globes is also a leading Oscar contender
In a historic year for female filmmakers at the Golden Globes, the 2021 director prize went to Chloe Zhao for her Frances McDormand-starrer 'Nomadland'. Zhao has now become the second woman to win the category in history.
The first woman to win Best Director at the Globes was Barbra Streisand for 'Yentl'. Zhao won the war for the Best Director for her work on the film 'Nomadland,' which also won her the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. She is also a leading Oscar contender. Zhao’s fellow nominees in 2021 were David Fincher who got nominated for 'Mank', Regina King for 'One Night in Miami', Emerald Fennell for 'Promising Young Woman', and Aaron Sorkin for 'The Trial of the Chicago 7'.
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Even before the 2021 Golden Globes Awards winners were announced, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association made history by nominating three women in the category of Best Director. Before this, it never happened that more than one woman got nominated in the category, in a single year. But this time, it was three women who bagged the nominations, Zhao, Fennell, and King.
Who is Chloe Zhao?
Born in Beijing, Zhao is the daughter of a company manager and a hospital worker. She says she was lazy at school and passed her days by drawing manga for fun. At the age of 15, Zhao was sent to the UK and enrolled in a boarding school before venturing out to the US, where she had the chance to be someone else. “I wanted to be where Michael Jackson was,” she told Vogue magazine, as she felt constricted growing up within an ancient culture that expected her “to be a certain way”.
Zhao loves the plains whether in Mongolia, which she visited during her childhood, or in South Dakota where she made her first feature film, 'Songs My Brothers Taught Me'. Developed at the Sundance Institute workshop, and produced by Zhao and actor Forest Whitaker. The film premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and was later screened at the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. She has graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a political science degree, but later got discouraged in the process. After graduating, she moved to New York and tread water with odd jobs like party-promoter, real-estate and even bartending. The latter gig came as a revelation as she enjoyed learning about other people’s life stories and decided to enroll in the prestigious New York University Tisch School of the Arts graduate program.
Her second feature film, 'The Rider', won the Art Cinema Award at 2017 Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and garnered positive reviews, praising her for reinventing the Western.
“I feel like I'm in the business of recording time,” Zhao said in a recent interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer. “And I'm always curious about how people would like to be remembered. It's not about what I think. It's not about my own point of view.”