Duan Yihong may be Chinese cinema's best-kept secret. He secured his position as every director's favorite actor two years ago with his gritty portrait of a police captain in Cao Baoping's groundbreaking hard-boiled thriller The Dead End. His performance won him Best Actor at the Shanghai International Film Festival, Beijing Student Film Festival, and China Film Director's Guild Awards, as well as Best Supporting Actor at the Hundred Flowers Awards. He suddenly entered the A-list. Xinjiang-born Duan made his film debut in Wang Xiaoshuai's Drifters in 2003, which premiered in Cannes' Un Certain Regard sidebar. He has continued to bring his patented naturalism to groundbreaking films by Chinese cinema's most critically-acclaimed directors, including Lou Ye's relationship drama Summer Palace (2006), Gao Qunshu's oriental western Wind Blast (2010), Wang Quanan's rural epic White Deer Plain (2011), Sun Zhou's postmodern romcom I Do (2012), and Feng Xiaogang's wartime satire Back to 1942 (2012). After a two year break, Duan returned to cinema screens in 2017 in two outstanding films. In Leste Chen's high-concept dystopian thriller Battle of Memories he plays a police detective investigating the bizarre case of a famous novelist who has the memories of a serial killing implanted in his brain. In wild actioner Extraordinary Mission, directed by Alan Mak and Anthony Pun, he plays a ruthless Golden Triangle drug lord. NYAFF is proud to screen both films in the presence of one of China's greatest modern actors.