The now disbanded Bamseom Pirates consisted of two members: drummer (self-proclaimed) "mastermind" Kwon Yong-man, and bass player "informant/minion" Jang Sung-gun. The duo sometimes referred to their music as "grindcore" but more often self-deprecatingly described it as "just garbage and noise". With provocative “songs” like "All Hail Kim Jong-il" (not an ode to the leader of North Korea), or "Fuck Rhee Syngman" (the first president of South Korea), their music is half poetic, half nonsense, and mostly grunted lyrics. Photographer Park Jung-geun produced the band’s debut album, Seoul Inferno in 2010. As well as weird, iconoclastic performances in abandoned buildings and at various demonstrations, Bamseom Pirates has invented a unique form of participatory political theater. On September 21, 2011, Park was arrested for violating the National Security Law after tweeting messages like "Kim Jong-il Car Sex!". These three men are coming to New York... if Homeland Security lets them!

Florence Chan secured her Cinematic Arts degree from Hong Kong City University in 2011, followed by a master’s in Literary Arts and Cultural Studies from the University of Hong Kong. She wrote and produced the 30-minute film 6th March, which was amongst four nominatees at the 2012 Golden Horse Awards for Best Short Film. Directed by Wong Chun, whom she studied with at HKCU, it focuses on three generations of police officers and their testy conversation with three young political protesters arrested for unlawful assembly. In late 2014, her screenplay for Mad World was one of three projects selected into the First Feature Film Initiative by Create Hong Kong and the Film Development Fund of Hong Kong. The candid exploration of mental illness that reinvents Hong Kong's tenement drama genre won Best New Director for Wong Chun, and Best Supporting Actress for Elaine Jin at the 2016 Golden Horse Awards.

After graduating from National Taiwan University in 1989, Chen Mei-juin moved to Los Angeles where she earned her master's degree in visual anthropology at the University of Southern California. In 1993, she founded Lotus Film Productions and produced a series of documentaries exploring iconic figures in both American and Chinese culture including Hollywood Hotel (1994), which chronicles the eccentric tenants of a resident hotel on Hollywood Boulevard and The Worlds of Mei Lanfang (2000), about the Peking opera legend. She is also known for a slew of martial arts documentaries including the PBS production The Black Kung Fu Experience, which spotlights several African American trailblazers such as Ron Van Clief. With the Kinmen island-shot The Gangster's Daughter, her first narrative feature, Chen says, "I wanted to make a really fine commercial film that is full of Taiwanese elements. It is a film about Taiwanese society."

Like most independent directors of his generation in South Korea, Cho Hyun-hoon first gained notice with his short films, Metamorphosis (2007) and The Mother’s Family (2013). This first feature was produced with the support of the Korean Film Council's Independent Film Fund. He spent a year talking to street kids to develop the screenplay, which focuses on two marginalized characters. "Personally, I have been attracted to stories of runaways and transgender people and made friends with them," says Cho. "I realised that they have extraordinary strength and courage that I really wanted to tell others about." Jane was one of a handful of buzz titles at last year's Busan International Film Festival where it won the CGV Art House Award that guaranteed it local distribution. The jury commended the film's acting and direction that "enable us to anticipate the future of Korean cinema with excitement".

Still a student in the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University, Chutimon "Aokbab" Chuengcharoensukying is Thailand's hottest new movie star. The 21-year-old has worked as a fashion model since she was 15-years-old and appeared in several music videos for Thai bands. Last year, she starred in Thank You for Sharing, an 8-minute viral short about cyberbullying that has over one million views on YouTube. Director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, whose Heart Attack was one of the best received films at last year's NYAFF, convinced her to unlearn the exaggerated style of television acting classes to present a natural persona. To secure the lead role in high school thriller Bad Genius she was auditioned twice, finally winning the role over hundreds of other hopefuls. Director Nattawut Poonpiriya says that throughout the screenwriting process, he couldn't imagine which actress could personify her quick-witted and strong-willed character, which anchors the film on several levels. "For solving the great demands of portraying Lynn’s character, Aokbab proved herself the correct answer for this film," said Poonpiriya. "Her great skill as an actress is to show that 'less is more': how she expressed her character’s choices through her eyes, her gestures and her movements made me a believer that this girl has the brains, the guts, and the ability to control and handle every step of the game without having to rely on anybody else."

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.

Gang Dong-won’s career has been marked by daring casting choices, emotionally-charged performances and an irrefutable charisma. While studying mechanical engineering at Hanyang University, Gang was scouted and became a successful runway model. He proved himself more than just a pretty face when he shifted to acting in 2013 with a television series and leading roles in the romantic comedy Too Beautiful to Lie and the love triangle drama A Romance of Their Own (a.k.a. Temptation of Wolves); for the latter he won Best New Actor at the Korean Film Awards. As he honed his craft, Gang has shown a natural gift for bringing surprising nuances to complex roles. Even when acting opposite experienced veterans, he has held his own. His most iconic films include Lee Myung-se’s postmodern martial arts film Duelist (2005), Park Jin-pyo’s kidnapping drama Voice of a Murderer (2007), and Jang Hoon’s spy thriller Secret Reunion (2010), in which he starred as a North Korean assassin. Last year, NYAFF presented two of his films, The Priests and A Violent Prosecutor, blockbuster hits in which he portrayed a demon-battling-novice and a jailhouse conman respectively. He will next star in Kim Jee-woon's long-anticipated anime adaptation Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, set in an alternate universe in which North and South Korea are preparing for reunification.

A graduate of Seoul Institute of the Arts, Gu has directed three short films, Turtles (2011), Where is My DVD? (2013) and Now Playing (2014). He has also made quite a mark for his roles in indie features and shorts, including Jo Sung-hee's 43-minute Don't Step Out of the House (2009). Gu has played a wide variety of characters and received praise for his innate knack at conveying emotion not only through dialogue, but also deceptively subtle expressions. Gu’s strikingly candid portrayal of the titular transgender woman in Jane is a milestone in the depiction of LGBTQ characters in Korean cinema. Awarded Actor of the Year at last year's Busan International Film Festival for this achievment, a juror stated, "There are many other up-and-coming actors in the field of cinema, however, based on his performance in the film, this actor has moved my heart the most."

Han Ye-ri started her career acting in shorts before gaining recognition in 2012 for her supporting role in high-stakes sports drama As One. Her performance as Bae Doona's North Korean roommate secured her Best New Actress at the 2013 Baeksang Arts Awards. The following year, she played the blue-dressed, ever-present dead wife in Dear Dolphin and had her first leading role as the bullied schoolgirl befriended by a handsome North Korean assassin in Commitment. In 2013 she also started filming Haemoo, as the stowaway on a trawler whose rescue-at-sea is the catalyst for great tragedy. It cemented her reputation as one of South Korea's most promising new talents, able to tackle any role. She has contined to elude easy classification with roles in unconventional romances Love Guide for Dumpees and Worst Woman. In A Quiet Life she plays another outsider, Chinese-Korean muse to three misfit hustlers at her rundown bar.

Derek Hui graduated from Hong Kong City University's School of Creative Media before starting his film career as an assistant editor for Teddy Chen. He got his big break working on Peter Chan's The Warlords in 2007. Since then he has edited more than 20 films including some of Chinese-language cinema's most challenging projects, such as Chen Kaige's Sacrifice (2010), Chan's Wu Xia (a.k.a. Dragon, 2010), Keanu Reaves' Man of Tai Chi (2013), Derek Yee's I Am Somebody (2015), and Renny Harlin's Jackie Chan action film Skiptrace (2016). Hui's work on Teddy Chen's Bodyguards and Assassins (2009) and Derek Tsang's Soul Mate (2016) garnered Golden Horse Award nominations. He has been nominated three times for editing at the Hong Kong Film Awards, where he holds the record as their youngest nominee. This is Not What I Expected, his starry reinvention of the Chinese romcom, is his directorial debut.

After completing a physics degree at Tohoku University, Ishikawa Kei studied film directing at the Łódź Film School in Poland. His short films include Dear World (2008) and It's All in the Finger, which traveled to Mar Del Plata and New Directors, New Films respectively. His Japan/Poland co-production project Baby, a fantasy about parents who must convince their unborn child to be born, won the top prize at the 2013 Network of Asian Fantastic Films in Bucheon, South Korea. "When I was making films in Poland, nothing seemed real to me," says Ishikawa. "It was not my language, not my childhood. When I shot a documentary there, the reality turned out surreal and absurd to me. I started to seek out something universal in the subject and characters. Interestingly I had to do the same here as well, when making a film in Japan about my own culture." Traces of Sin is his feature debut.

A fine arts major, Jung Byung-gil trained as a stuntman at the Seoul Action School before studying filmmaking at Chungang University. In 2008, NYAFF presented the international premiere of his debut feature, Action Boys, a riveting documentary about his fellow students at the school and how they fared in the industry after graduation. His first narrative feature, Confession of Murder (2012, NYAFF 2013), was a high-concept thriller about a pretty boy serial killer who resurfaces after the statute of limitations expires to taunt the grizzled cop that failed to catch him. (It was recently remade in Japan by Yu Irie as Memories of a Murderer.) After a five year gap, Jung returns to NYAFF with his dynamic female revenge actioner The Villainess (2017), fresh from its premiere at Cannes. 63 of the film's 70 shooting days were spent on action and stunts, with Jung pitting actress Kim Ok-vin (Dasepo Naughty Girls, Thirst) against at least two - and often more than a dozen – assailants in the film’s plethora of violent fight scenes. "I always like doing the opposite of what people tell me to do," says Jung. "Put it this way: People say an action film led by an actress won’t work, but maybe that simply means no one has tried it. I thought this was the right time to go for it myself." Jung will receive the Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema for his liberating reinvention of the contemporary action movie.

Seoul-born Jung Yoon-suk studied documentary filmmaking at the Korean National University of the Arts. In his documentaries, he asks critical questions about the South Korean state. His first feature, Non-Fiction Diary, turned an exploration of an infamous real-life 1990s murder into an analysis of stumbling faith in Korean society. In Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno, his focus is two punk musicians who use music to resist the Korean establishment - "hypocritical, conservative money-grabbers and their often violent hold on society." While filming, band member Park Jung-geun was arrested for violating the National Security Law when he posted positive messages about North Korea online. "If it's not criminals, then the South Korean elite will always find another enemy," says Jung Yoon-suk. "When all else fails, then it is the North Koreans. Capitalist society in South Korea is closely bound up with nationalism. You cannot criticize or oppose one without the other.

Jennifer Kim studied acting at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts at the Stella Adler Studio as well as London's Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts and can be seen in both major film and television roles as well as notable independent productions from Mozard in the Jungle to (her eponymous role in) Female Pervert.

Born in South Africa, Lawrence Lau studied filmmaking in California before working for Radio Television Hong Kong and as assistant director on Tsui Hark's genre classic The Butterfly Murders (1979). Lau's career has spanned a wide range of genres with his early films focusing on society's underdogs: Gangs (1988), Queen of Temple Street (1990), and Dreams of Glory: A Boxer's Story (1991). He next had a major hit with the two-part, decades-spanning, Andy Lau-starring Lee Rock films about police corruption. His 1960s-set prequel, Arrest the Restless (1992), starred Leslie Cheung as a rebellious teen falsely accused of murder. After a five-year gap, he returned to directing in 2000 with his electric, Johnnie To-produced Spacked Out about a group of teenage girl delinquents. Recent films include industry satire My Name is Fame (2006), political thriller Ballistic (2008) and Dealer/Healer (2017), where Lau once again presents a revealing, humanistic look at Hong Kong's criminal underworld.

A graduate of Suwon University, Lee Min-ji is one of Korean cinema's most recognizable and awarded indie actresses. Early in her career she headlined two striking debut features, Jang Kun-jae's youth drama Eighteen (2009) and Jo Sung-hee's apocalyptic horror End of Animal (2010); for the latter she won a Muhr AsiaAfrica Special Mention at the Dubai International Film Festival. A year later, her performance in Lee Woo-jung's short See You Tomorrow secured her the Independent Star Award at the 2011 Seoul Independent Film Festival and Best Actress at the Busan International Short Film Festival. In 2013 she starred in Moon Byoung-gon's Safe, which won Best Short Film at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2015, she started to land smaller roles in mainstream films, including Coin Locker Girl, The Piper and Phantom Detective. With Jane, she continues her winning streak, with Best Actress of the Year award at last year's Busan International Film Festival.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Alan Lo Wai-lun graduated with a degree in digital film and television from the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education. In 2014, he was a student at the Film Academy of the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival under dean Hou Hsiao-hsien. His short films lay bare his penchant for genre. Zombie Guillotines (2012) follows a group of misfits - including Celina Jade as a deadly nun - who survive the zombie apocalypse by employing do-it-yourself weapons made out of odds and ends from the hair salon they are trapped within. In Empty Space (2014), a man fantasizes about winning a one-way ticket to outer space to escape a contaminated planet and his breakup with his girlfriend. For his debut feature Zombiology: Enjoy Yourself Tonight, Lo partnered with Clement Cheng (Gallants, Audience Award co-winner at NYAFF 2010) to adapt Hong Kong zombie novel series Z for Zombie.

Heiward Mak graduated in graphics design before studying at Hong Kong City University's School of Creative Media. Her 30-minute graduation short Lovers' Lover caught the attention of Eric Tsang who hired her to co-wrote the screenplay of Pang Ho-cheung's Men Suddenly in Black 2 (2006). Two years later, Tsang commissioned her first feature film as director, High Noon (2008, NYAFF 2009), the Hong Kong episode in a series of films about youth. Focused on nine teenagers, the depiction of vulgar and sexually-active Hong Kong youth was given a restricted Category III censorship rating in Hong Kong. She has continued to work as a screenwriter, co-writing Pang's Love in a Puff (2010), which won Best Screenplay at the Hong Kong Film Awards. Her subsequent features as a director are Ex (2011) starring Gillian Chung, Diva (2012) starring Joey Yung, and television movie Uncertain Relationships Society (2014). She recently produced Mad World.

Starting out as "gravure idol" (Japan’s ubiquitous version of the bikini model) Mogami Yuki in 2009, Mamiya Yuki adopted her new name in 2012 after shifting to acting. A year later, she stormed onto cinema screens with two films by genre master Ishii Takashi. After a supporting role in Hello, My Dolly Girlfriend, she fearlessly co-starred as abducted 17-year-old Naoko in the S&M opus Sweet Obsession (a.k.a. Sweet Whip). She has maintained her commitment to challenging genre cinema, appearing in Iguchi Noboru's self-aware horror Live and Yoshida Kota's manga adaptation The Torture Club in 2014, and Kubota Shoji’s Edogawa Rampo adaptation The Crawler in the Attic in 2016. With Wet Woman in the Wind she has forged one of the most striking personae (and screen entrances) of contemporary Japanese cinema, a fox demon made flesh that seduces any man that hears her siren call.

Carrie Ng dropped out of high school to join dominant Hong Kong television studio TVB, where her sultry looks got her typecast in supporting roles as mistresses and prostitutes. Quitting in 1987, her movie breakthrough came swiftly with Ringo Lam's City on Fire, starring opposite Chow Yun-fat. In 1993, she helped legitimize Category III movies (Hong Kong’s 18+ rating for films that are invariably salacious and envelope-pushing) by winning the coveted Best Actress award at Taiwan's Golden Horse Film Awards for her performance as a cocaine-crazed murder accomplice in Remains of a Woman. While she is best known outside Hong Kong for her performances in cult classics Sex and Zen and Naked Killer, she has worked with many of Chinese-language cinema’s leading directors, including Edward Yang, Tsui Hark, Stephen Chow and Pang Ho-cheung. She recently moved behind the camera as the co-director and producer of thriller Angel Whispers (2015).

After graduating from Chiba University's Image Science program in 1994, Ogigami Naoko studied film at the University of Southern California, returning to Japan in 2000. She directed two short films, Ayako (1999), shot in the US, and Hoshino-kun, Yumino-kun (2001). The latter won the PIA Festival Scholarship Award, which led to the festival financing and producing her first feature, Yoshino's Barber Shop (2004). The light comedy is about a middle-aged woman in a small town who cuts boys' hair identically until a transfer student with bleached hair arrives. The film established a recurring theme in her work: an outsider disrupting a community by shining a light on its cultural stereotypes. Her subsequent films include Kamome Diner (2006), about a middle-aged Japanese woman who opens a diner in Helsinki, and Glasses (2007) about a university professor vacationing on an island full of eccentrics. Her latest film, Close-Knit, focuses on another outsider, a transgender.

Nattawut "Baz" Poonpiriya is no stranger to New York, or NYAFF, which he regularly attended when studying graphic design at Pratt Institute. His first feature was wholly set and partly shot in New York, the dark thriller Countdown (NYAFF 2013). The film, in which a group of Thai students are terrorized by their drug dealer, was a radical departure for its studio, GTH, best known for less risqué horrors, romantic comedies and dramas. After taking a break for five years - working on commercials, music videos, and viral videos - he returns to the big screen with Bad Genius. This time, Poonpiriya has boldly reinvented commercial Thai cinema with a blockbuster hit that doesn't rely on romance or ghosts. He spent more than a year developing the screenplay, based on a concept from his producers: "Everyone is born with unequal abilities." Poonpiriya is in a class of his own.

Mikhail Red began making short films when he was 15 years old, including Kamera (2008), Harang (2009), Hazard (2010) and Inosensya (2011). Six years later he directed his micro-budget feature debut, Rekorder, about a once-professional cinematographer who compulsively records everything on his camcorder, only to capture a murder. It won five international awards including Best New Director at the 2014 Vancouver International Film Festival. Mikhail's radically different second feature, Birdshot, was developed at various international project markets and was filmed on ten times the budget. The slow-burning ecological thriller won the Best Asian Feature Film Award at the 2016 Tokyo International Film Festival. Together with Birdshot producer Pamela L. Reyes, he is now developing Lost Dahlias, about a young housemaid faced with the twin horrors of martial law and her American employer, who she suspects is a serial killer. Later this year, Red shoots his third feature, Neomanila, a mother-and-son tale of the death squads committing extrajudicial killings in present-day Metro Manila.

Bad Genius features Chanon "Non" Santinatornkul in his first leading movie role as diligent student Bank whose moral compass gets realigned after he loses his scholarship. It is a part director Nattawut "Baz" Poonpiriya says the actor was "truly born to play." To prepare, Santinatornkul was given the screenplay months in advance and participated in acting workshops with his fellow cast members. He had previously played supporting roles in Naphat Chaithiangthum's boys' love movies Love's Coming (2014) and Love You You (2015). On television, after playing a secondary role in Hormones 3 (2015), he recently headlined sitcom spin-off Bang Rak Soi 9/1 (2016) and school drama Friend Day the Series (2017) in which his buff character is swooned over by both boys and girls. He has ambitions to work behind the camera and is currently majoring in film production at Bangkok's Mahidol University International College.

Since moving to New York, George Schmalz worked for both Oscilloscope Laboratories and Kino Lorber before moving to Kickstarter, where he helped hundreds of film projects come to life. Schmalz currently works as the Curator for AMC's video-on-demand platform Sundance Now.

Kyoto-born Shiota Akihiko began making 8mm films with fellow students Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Manda Kunitoshi while at Rikkyo University. He honed his screenwriting craft under Yamatoya Atsushi, a frequent collaborator of Suzuki Seijun, Wakamatsu Koji and Fujita Toshiya. Shiota's first two films as director, Moonlight Whispers and Don't Look Back, were both screened at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1999. Since then he has switched between making independent films and blockbusters such as Yomigaeri and Dororo. "Having been given the honor of making a new entry in the Nikkatsu Roman Porno canon, I attempted to evoke the entire human experience in my film," says Shiota about his newest film, Wet Woman in the Wind. "I believe that fleeting miracles are born from the bodies of actors, and this influenced my direction of every single scene. This enabled me to create what I am convinced is my best work to date.

Eric Tsang is one of the most ubiquitous faces in Hong Kong cinema, with over 200 acting credits to his name. Yet his most vital contribution to the film world has been as a producer. Whenever the local industry was at a low ebb, Tsang was there to assist a new generation of directors. It was soccer and not movies that was in his blood. Following in his father's footsteps, he played for Hong Kong at the Asian Youth Games in 1970. It was kung-fu movie legend Lau Kar-leung that persuaded Tsang to become a stuntman. He then graduated to screenwriting, directing, and producing. Tsang was in the 'Gang of Seven' that ran Cinema City in the 1980s, directing the first two Aces Go Places films, breakout action-comedies that defined the first half of the decade before the studio invented the "heroic bloodshed" genre with John Woo's A Better Tomorrow. Cinema City's success is in part attributed to its philosophy of supporting new directors. In 1990, Tsang co-founded United Filmmakers Organization with Peter Chan, Claudie Chung, Jacob Cheung and Lee Chi-ngai to nurture first-time directors, with the intent of making an alternative cinema to the action and comedy films dominating local screens. Its first production was Chan's Alan and Eric: Between Hello and Goodbye starring Tsang, Alan Tam and Maggie Cheung. In 2003, Hong Kong cinema was in dire straits. Just 40 films were produced; it was the year of SARS, and Leslie Cheung's suicide. Tsang stepped in again, turning to independent directors for fresh ideas. He produced the debut films of Adam Wong (When Beckham Met Owen, 2004), Derek Kwok (The Pye-Dog, 2007) and Heiward Mak (High Noon, 2008). As we focus on new filmmakers this year with our Young Blood Hong Kong sidebar, it's perfect timing to recognize Eric Tsang's contribution to local film culture not as its funny man but as its heart and soul. We present Eric Tsang with the 2017 NYAFF Star Asia Lifetime Achievement Award for shining bright both in front of and behind the camera.

Audience member Kristina Winters travels to New York every year to attend NYAFF: "In Texas we have a saying, that 'I wasn't born here, but I got here as fast as I could!' I say the same thing about NYAFF. My first fest wasn't until 2014. I've been to every NYAFF since and I've seen almost every NYAFF film."

Wong Chun graduated from the School of Creative Media at Hong Kong City University in 2011, majoring in Cinematic Arts. His 30-minute film 6th March, based on a screenplay co-written with fellow HKCU graduate Florence Chan, was nominated for Best Short Film at the 2012 Golden Horse Awards. In late 2014, Chan's screenplay for Mad World was one of three films selected into the First Feature Film Initiative by Create Hong Kong and the Film Development Fund of Hong Kong. For his directorial debut, Wong secured career-best performances from stars Shawn Yue, Eric Tsang, Elaine Jin and Charmaine Fong. The candid exploration of mental illness, including how its victims face discrimination at every turn, reinvents Hong Kong's tenement drama genre for the modern era. For his first feature, Wong Chun won Best New Director at both the 2016 Golden Horse Awards and the 2017 Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards.

Self-taught fireman-turned-director Yang Shupeng is one of China's least known but most interesting filmmakers. His first feature, The Cold Flame (2005), is a wartime drama about the friendship between a Kuomintang officer and a 14-year-old orphan. His canny casting of Zhang Hanyu - before he became a major star in Feng Xiaogang's Assembly (2007) - secured it a limited theatrical release in 2008. His next film, The Robbers (2009), cast Hu Jun and Jiang Wu in a blackly comic homage to Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. His third feature, An Inaccurate Memoir (2012), released as Eastern Bandits in North America, stars Huang Xiaoming in a wartime bandit opera that NYAFF likened to "an undiscovered Peckinpah Western". Yang's fourth feature, Blood of Youth, is his first contemporary film. Together with the recent works of Cao Baoping, Ding Sheng and Gao Qunshu, it is one in a wave of films reshaping the modern Chinese thriller.

China-born, ethnic Korean Zhang Lu was a professor of Chinese literature at Yanbian University when he made his first short film at 38-years-old after betting a director friend that "anyone can make a film." The near-silent, experimental Eleven (2000) competed at the Venice International Film Festival. The success secured him funding from South Korea for his first feature, Tang Poetry (2003), about the claustrophobic life of a middle-aged pickpocket during the SARS crisis. His third feature, Desert Dream (2007), set on the China-Mongolia border, competed at the Berlin International Film Festival, finally securing his reputation as an international film auteur. Since moving to South Korea in 2012, where he is currently professor of film studies at Yonsei University, his films have become lighter and more playful in tone. He describes his new film, A Quiet Dream (2016), as "more audience-friendly and fun than my previous works.".