Marvel Studios has hired U.S.-based Chinese filmmaker Chloe Zhao to direct “The Eternals” movie, which is set to launch the fourth phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), according to U.S. media reports. She will also become the second female director to direct a MCU superhero film following Anna Boden, who is co-directing “Captain Marvel” with Ryan Fleck. Born in Beijing, Zhao, also known as Zhao Ting, made her directorial debut with the 2015 indie film “Songs My Brothers Taught Me.” “The Rider,” her follow-up feature in 2017, was critically acclaimed and was nominated for best film and director at the Independent Spirit Awards. Earlier this year, Zhao was considered by Marvel to helm the upcoming “Black Widow” solo film starring Scarlett Johansson, but Australian director Cate Shortland eventually got the job in July. Created by U.S. comic book artist Jack Kirby in 1976, the Eternals are a race of near-immortal beings who lived on Earth and shaped its history and civilizations. Phase four of the MCU will include sequels to “Spider-Man,” “Black Panther,” “Doctor Strange” and “Guardians of the Galaxy,” as well as the “Black Widow” movie. The 35-year-old director said she grew up drawing Japanese manga, and describes herself as ambivalent. “I’m not someone who takes on one identity and lets it form my whole being,” she says in a previous interview. “I think I’m more a jack of all trades.” Her malleability could have something to do with feeling like an outsider most of her life. Zhao was raised in Beijing, then decamped to boarding school in England, college in Massachusetts, and finally graduate school in New York City, where she studied film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Now she lives in Ojai, California. “Growing up, I was very rebellious,” she says. “I had this tsunami of influences from Western pop culture. I never formed a strong sense of national or cultural identity. My English has issues, my Chinese has issues. It’s a quite liquid form of identity.” It was during her post-grad school years in New York that she first felt the pull of the American West. A story she read in the newspaper — about a rash of suicides among teenagers in Native American tribes — led her to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. “I came across some images of a reservation, and even within one frame. There’s so much contradiction,” she says. That contradiction — one way of life caught between the past and the present — became the seed of her first film, 2015’s coming-of-age drama “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” about a young Lakota boy debating whether to leave his native reservation. Three years later, she has followed up on Pine Ridge Reservation life with “The Rider.” After a year spent with the film touring the festival circuit and garnering overwhelming critical acclaim, Zhao says she’s ready for new projects and new stories. (SD-Agencies) | 