Dante Lam entered the film industry as a production assistant at Cinema City in 1985, just as the studio birthed a new kind of action cinema by John Woo and Ringo Lam. He started directing his own action films in 1997, including dark action-drama Beast Cops (1998), which won Best Picture and Best Director at the Hong Kong Film Awards. Over the next five years, Lam was hard to pin down, making a series of genre experiments. In 2008, after a two year hiatus, he returned with labyrinthine psychodrama Beast Stalker which kickstarted the most exciting decade of his career. He attends NYAFF with his biggest film yet, epic action spectacle Operation Red Sea (2018), now the second-highest grossing Chinese-language film of all time.