Joan Chen began her film career in Shanghai at fourteen. Her performance in Little Flower (1979) won her China’s Hundred Flowers Award for Best Actress and made her a star before she turned twenty. She left China for the United States in 1981 and has built a screen career spanning more than four decades, with roles in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990), Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), and Jiang Wen’s The Sun Also Rises (2007). She has won Best Actress twice at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards, for Red Rose, White Rose (1994) and The Home Song Stories (2007). Her performance in Sean Wang’s Dìdi, which premiered at Sundance in 2024 and won both the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and the Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble, brought a new generation to her work. As a director, she debuted with Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (1998), which swept the Golden Horse Awards with seven wins, including Best Feature Film and Best Director, and followed it with Autumn in New York (2000), starring Richard Gere and Winona Ryder. She has presided over the Golden Horse jury and served on international festival juries. NYAFF presents her with the Star Asia Lifetime Achievement Award at the Opening Weekend Gala and screens Montreal, My Beautiful.

Yeon Sang-ho emerged from independent animation with The King of Pigs (2011), an unflinching portrait of school violence, class cruelty, and the wounds Korean society teaches its children to carry. He crossed into live action with Train to Busan (2016), the Cannes Midnight Screenings sensation that helped turn the Korean zombie film into a global phenomenon. Since then, he has moved restlessly across scale and format, from the animated Seoul Station to Peninsula, Jung_E, Revelations, The Ugly, and now Colony. Arriving at NYAFF as a North American premiere after its Cannes Midnight Screenings world premiere, Colony returns Yeon to the same Cannes section that launched Train to Busan ten years earlier. Yeon opens NYAFF’s 25th edition in person on July 10 and appears through opening weekend, which also features the 10th-anniversary 4K restoration of Train to Busan.