Kai Ko won Best New Performer at the Golden Horse Awards for You Are the Apple of My Eye (2011) and went on to roles in Tiny Times and Till We Meet Again (2021), which won him Best Actor at the Taipei Film Awards. He made his directing debut with Bad Education (2022). In I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish he plays Hua, a down-on-his-luck debt collector in Macau's backstreets, a performance for which he reportedly gained ten kilograms and took a significant pay cut to support the first-time directors.

Chao Koi-wang was born in Macau and educated in Taiwan, and his short films have been selected for festivals around the world. His feature debut, I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish (2026), co-directed with Hu Chin-yen, trades casino glitz for the residential backstreets of Macau, following a young girl and a debt collector bound by a stack of chips and a runaway father's debt. The film had its world premiere in competition at the Udine Far East Film Festival and screened in the Taipei Film Festival's International New Talent Competition.

David Tang Tsai Yang is one of Taiwan’s most seasoned executive producers, with a career spanning journalism, talent representation, and film and television production. A former film reporter for Taiwan’s United Evening News, he entered production in 2006 after more than twenty years covering Chinese-language cinema and building close industry ties across Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and Macau. His credits range from major commercial productions including John Woo’s Red Cliff and Su Chao-pin’s Reign of Assassins to award-recognized Taiwanese titles such as Who Killed Cock Robin, Dad’s Suit, The Soul, The Abandoned, My Heavenly City, and A Boy and A Girl. His work has earned nominations and prizes from the Golden Horse Awards, Golden Bell Awards, Taipei Film Awards, and Busan International Film Festival.