Angela Yuen built a breakout out of a single pandemic year. She modeled while studying accounting at Hong Kong Baptist University, became widely known through a 2015 Maxim's commercial, and turned to acting soon after. Christopher Doyle cast her in The White Girl (2017), the fishing-village fable he co-directed, opposite Joe Odagiri, and she drew wider notice in Little Q (2019). Then 2022 brought three releases at once: the comedy Chilli Laugh Story, the family drama Hong Kong Family, and Lam Sum's The Narrow Road, in which she plays Candy, a free-spirited single mother taking cleaning work through locked-down Hong Kong opposite Louis Cheung. That performance earned her Best Leading Actress nominations at the 59th Golden Horse Awards and the 41st Hong Kong Film Awards. She has scarcely left the screen since, with leads across film and series in Hong Kong and Taiwan. NYAFF presents Yuen with the Screen International Rising Star Award and screens two of her new films, Afterpiece and Gamer Girls, with the actress in attendance.

Veronica Bassetto is a multidisciplinary artist working across screenwriting, directing, editing, and visual design. A graduate of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design (BA(Hons) Advertising), she co-wrote the web series Extreme 17, recognized in the 2019 Outstanding Network Audiovisual Works Promotion. In 2020, she co-directed Gamer Girls, a project selected for the 6th Hong Kong Film Development Fund’s First Feature Film Initiative.