The Badlands of South Dakota.
It's one of those belt states Deep America, the Midwestern, the Middle West, although for landscapes and way of life it still looks a lot like that Wild West of cowboy movies. With an extension of almost 200 thousand km2, barely reaches four inhabitants per square kilometer. South Dakota is nature in its purest form. Wild. A direct connection with the elements. With sunrises behind infinite plains or sudden elevations.
South Dakota is famous for being the state of the Mount Rushmore, in which the faces of four US presidents are sculpted; but after watching the movie The Rider you'll want to include it as mandatory stop on your next road trip around the country.
Brady, a real cowboy.
Something like this happened to his director Chloe Zhao. She was born in Beijing, she has lived all over the world from the age of 14 until she settled in the United States. Knowing the country, she discovered the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota inhabited by Native Americans the Lakota, descendants of the Sioux, and cowboys for generations. People dedicated to horses, bulls, rodeos. And to live in intimate communion with the land that they have been given, in which they were born and find it hard to leave.
In that place she directed her first film Songs My Brother Taught Me and rolling it she met Brady Jandreau, one of these cowboys, to whom she immediately promised a movie with him.
As bad luck would have it, the story for that film came about when Brady, a rodeo rider since he was three years old, fell and suffered a concussion for which he was banned from riding horses again. He couldn't accept it. The Rider is the true story of him – even with his father and sister playing his father and sister – although he promises that he was acting.
They call them empty lands, bad lands...
The Rider He talks about what it means to be a cowboy today. Nothing like those movie cowboys. "It's not a lot like most old westerns," Brady laughs. Redefine masculinity associated with these stereotypes with this protagonist who rethinks his identity when he has to stop doing what he was raised to do.
“God gives each of us a purpose: for horses it is to run through the meadow; for a cowboy to ride the horse”, he says in the movie. He doesn't understand why you have to kill a horse when he's wounded and it no longer serves his purpose, and he, who can't go rodeo anymore, they let him live.
But his identity goes much further than the animals, is rooted in these “bad lands”, literally wastelands, the Badlands, those grandiose, inhospitable landscapes of South Dakota, poor by economic standards, incredibly rich in spirit.
The man who danced with the horses.
The Rider is an attempt to answer the big questions of identity, "who are we, what are we doing here," says Zhao, "from the microscopic perspective of this world." Yes too: "An authentic portrait of that deep, tough, honest, beautiful America that I deeply love and respect."
natural communion.
As soon as you see those sunrises and sunsets, it will also be the excuse to mount a next trip to Lakota state.