In Hamnet, Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) asks William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) to introduce himself by telling her a story. It is her way of seeing who this man really is.

Here, storytelling becomes a mirror held up to the heart. Are we, as human beings, moved by the same things? Are our hearts shaped from the same material?

Chloé Zhao knows how to make people feel. Hamnet sees a new phrase in her artistry, turning a Western literary classic into a quiet meditation on grief, love and the enduring power of art.

Born in Beijing in 1982, as a child Chloé Zhao (赵婷, Zhào Tíng) loved manga, drawn to Japanese Shinto ideas, where every object carries a spirit.

She wrote fan fiction, went to movies and fell in love with Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997), a life-changing film she still rewatches.

At 14, she was sent to a boarding school in England, speaking almost no English. The isolation forced her to look beyond language. “A smile is a smile, a touch is a touch,” she later told the BBC. That attentiveness to gesture and silence became a signature of her filmmaking.

Allured by Hollywood, Zhao moved to Los Angeles for high school, then studied political science at college. She eventually found her way to cinema at New York University, where Spike Lee encouraged her to trust her own voice.

In 2015, Zhao started directing small-scale, slow-burn features set in........

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