Anna Broinowski is a multiple AFI award-winning director, writer and producer who has been making films since 1995.

Her documentaries include Forbidden Lie$, Helen's War, Sexing the Label and Hell Bento!!. Awards include 3 AFIs, the Rome Film Festival Cult Prize, a Walkley Award for Journalism, the Russian Film Critics' prize, the Al Jazeera Film Festival Golden Award, two Australian Film Critics' awards, the 2008 NSW Premier's Literary Award and Best Director at Films Des Femmes in France.

Forbidden Lie$ is one of the top ten highest grossing Australian documentaries of all time. It screened across the US, the Middle East and Europe, winning the inaugural Writer's Guild of America (East and West) Best Non-fiction Screenplay Award. Prior to filmmaking, Anna was a writer and actor, graduating from Sydney University in 1988 and NIDA in 1990. She won an Arts NSW Writer's Fellowship for her play The Gap (Currency Press), worked as a Film Project Manager at the Australian Film Commission, and has served on many international and Australian film festival juries. Anna has lectured on film at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, R.M.I.T. and Macquarie University, where she is completing a phD.

Felix Chong is a renowned director and screenwriter who graduated from the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University’s School of Communication. He worked as a copywriter and script supervisor for TVB before joining the movie industry and is the author of many screenplays.

Among his masterpieces, the much acclaimed Infernal Affairs trilogy won numerous awards at the Hong Kong Film Awards and the Golden Bauhinia Awards. It also won the award for Best Screenplay from the Hong Kong Screenwriters’ Guild. Infernal Affairs was adapted by Martin Scorsese as the Oscar-winning film The Departed. His other renowned screenplays include the award-winning Initial D and Confession of Pain.

He made his directional debut Once A Gangster (2010), which won him the Best New Director Award at the 2011 Hong Kong Film Awards. The Overheard film series has gained many nominations and film awards.

Ding Zishuo, a native of China's Zhejiang province, has been acting in television dramas since 2005. She made her film debut in 2011, headlining a 1950s period drama directed by Yi Hongbo. She has since appeared in two romantic comedies, Ma Zhiyu's Truth or Dare and Joe Ma's The Lion Roars 2. In Silent Witness she has her highest profile role yet as a resourceful female lawyer who helps unravel the truth behind a mysterious crime

Fei Xing is representative of the new generation of Chinese commercial film directors and screenwriters. A one-time folk-music graduate, guitarist and successful TV drama writer-director, he wrote and directed his first movie in 2010, the highly original The Man behind the Courtyard House, a contemporary crime drama that is a fascinating genre-bender. His second film Silent Witness (2012) is a superbly crafted crime/courtroom procedural that's a game-changer in Mainland genre cinema, raising the bar on an existing genre to a new level.

Discovered while working at a cafe in the trendy Seoul neighborhood of Apgujeong, Lee Jung-jae began his career as a model. He made the transition to television with 1993's Dinosaur Teacher and became a star almost overnight. He gained his first film role in 1994 in The Young Man but that same year the TV drama Feelings cemented Lee as a household name. Sandglass saw his silent bodyguard character gain more and more screen time over the course of increasingly behemoth ratings because audiences just wanted to see more of him. Lee was a heartthrob and went on to star in several more dramas before a starring role in E J-yong's 1998 romantic drama An Affair turned him into a full fledged movie star.

Lee followed this up with a Blue Dragon Film Award for his role in 1999's City of the Rising Sun, where he played a gambling addicted swindler who befriends a washed up boxer. He appeared in romantic dramas and comedies such as Il Mare, Last Present, and Over The Rainbow, but he also starred in action and thriller films like The Last Witness and Typhoon. Recently he has had a string of hits with films like the international crime caper The Thieves, gangster political film New World and Joseon-era court drama The Face Reader – the latter two films in particular have demonstrated Lee's maturation as a character actor, where he has delivered some of his best dramatic performances to date.

It is for this long career, and the fact that he is one of the biggest stars in South Korea and continues to challenge himself professionally, that we are celebrating Lee Jung-jae as this year's Korean Actor in Focus. We're bringing Lee Jung-jae over with the support of Korean Cultural Service in New York and screening The Face Reader, New World and Il Mare, all with Lee in attendance!

Well known for his short films, Lee’s short Papa (2004) was invited to the 2005 Busan International Film Festival and was the winner of the Korean Film Archive Award at the Seoul Independent Film Festival. His next short Enemy’s Apple (2007) was consecutively invited to Busan International Film Festival and won Best Film and Best Cinematography in the City of Sadness section at the Mise-en-scène Short Film Festival. It also played at the 8th New York Asian Film Festival. Han Gong-ju is his feature debut.

Alan Mak, a behind-the-scenes veteran of the movie industry, graduated from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 1990. He directed his first movie, Nude Fear in 1998. His later works, such as A War Named Desire and Rave Fever, further confirmed his directing talent. Alan co-directed and wrote the screenplay for the movie Infernal Affairs (2002) which won numerous awards in 2003, such as Hong Kong Film Awards and Golden Horse Awards, including Best Director and Best Screenplay.

He directed Initial D in 2005, followed by Moonlight in Tokyo, Confession of Pain, Lady Cop & Papa Crook, Overheard, Overheard 2, and The Silent War. In 2009, Overheard won the Hong Kong Film Critics Society's award in the category of Best Director and Film of Merit plus 6 nominations in the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2010, including Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Movie. In 2007, Alan Mak founded POP Movies Limited with his partner Felix Chong.

A graduate from Sungkyunkwan University, Moon So-ri started her acting career as part of the Hangang theater group and appeared in several plays and short films before debuting on the big screen in Lee Chang-dong's Peppermint Candy in 2000. Moon became the second Korean actress to ever win at the Venice Film Festival for her next role as a woman with cerebral palsy in Oasis, a role for which she also swept awards in South Korea.

Following these two films she appeared in Im Sang-soo's A Good Lawyer's Wife where her challenging portrayal of a sexually free woman again found her winning awards domestically and internationally. Moon made her career with films and awards that many work a lifetime for. From political minded films such as The President's Barber and Bravo! My Life, to fantasy fused historical TV drama The Legend, to sports film Forever the Moment, and family drama Family Ties, Moon continually chooses unique and challenging roles in a variety of genres.

She's starred in over 100 movies. Since 2005 her films have earned over HK$700 million at the box office. She is the Asia Advisor at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). And once, three ghosts peed on her (Vampire Kids, 1991). She is Sandra Ng, the Queen of Comedy and one of the most beloved actresses in the world.

Willing to do anything for a laugh, she started out in film while still a teenager, appearing in six hopping vampire movies, dozens of screwball comedies, and action movies like In the Line of Duty III (1988), Operation Pink Squad II (1989), and Thunder Cops II (1989). This last one was a hardcore revenge movie where she turned in a super-serious performance alongside Stephen Chow, also acting very serious. Producers quickly realized that drama was not their greatest strength and soon the two were cast together in Chow's massive comedy blockbuster, All for the Winner (1990). After that, there was no looking back as Ng appeared in comedy after comedy, from God of Gamblers III: Back to Shanghai (1991) and Royal Tramp I & II (1992) with Chow, to Gameboy Kids (1992) and Boys are Easy (1993). Add up her co-stars and you get a gallery of Hong Kong's biggest names: Maggie Cheung, Chow Yun-fat, Andy Lau, Brigitte Lin, and everyone in between.

In 1996, she played four roles in the experimental film 4 Faces of Eve, shot by Wong Kar-wai's longtime collaborator Christopher Doyle, and the following year she appeared in Young and Dangerous 4 (1997) in another dramatic role as the lesbian pimp, Sister 13. Her character's massive popularity led to Sister 13's very own spin-off film, Portland Street Blues (1998), for which she won Best Actress at both the Hong Kong Film Awards and the Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards. She began to broaden her range, playing a breast cancer survivor in Wilson Yip's Juliet in Love (2000), a mob wife in Dante Lam's moving gangster film, Jiang Hu: The Triad Zone (2002), and providing the voice of Mrs. McDull, mother to Hong Kong's clinically depressed animated piglet, McDull, in five animated McDull movies.

In 2003, she won the Golden Horse Award for Best Actress playing Kum, the unstoppable prostitute in Golden Chicken, and she's gone on to play the same role in both of its two sequels. She portrayed a bisexual woman in Ann Hui's All About Love (2010), which brought her another Best Actress trophy from the Asian Film Festival of Rome, and a humble housewife in Echoes of the Rainbow (2010), which won the Crystal Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and earned Ng a Best Actress nomination at the Hong Kong Film Awards. She's also the producer of the third installment in the popular Golden Chicken series, Golden Chickensss, which took in a whopping HK$43 million at the Hong Kong box office, when it was released For the Chinese New Year, a few months earlier.

"Nikaido... disappears into her roles, creating characters that are radically different from each other, from the swaggering gangster's daughter in Why Don't You Play in Hell? and the bubbly Gothic Lolita girl in Mourning Recipe to a cool-eyed student in the coming-of-age drama Au Revoir l'eté." –Mark Schilling

Born in 1994 in Naha, Okinawa, Nikaido Fumi has graced Japanese screens from an early age, starting from her first TV drama, Juken no Kamisama, in 2007, and Yakusho Koji's directorial debut, the bizarre family comedy Toad's Oil, in 2009. She rose to international prominence in 2011, when she received the Marcello Mastroianni Award (a prize awarded to best newcomers) at the 2011 Venice Film Festival for her outstanding electrifying performance in Sion Sono's Himizu, jointly with co-star Sometani Shota (whose girlfriend she played).

Since then, she has appeared in Brain Man, alongside star actor Ikuta Toma, Miike Takashi's Lesson of Evil, and Tanada Yuki's Mourning Recipe. As part of a focus on the meteoric ascension of the 20-year-old former model and now full-fledged actress, NYAFF will present Fukada Koji's summer-at-the-beach drama Au Revoir l'eté, Sono's action comedy Why Don't You Play in Hell?, and My Man by Kumakiri Kazuyoshi.

South Korea's award-winning leading man since the 1980s, Park Joong-hoon's breakthrough film was 1987's Youth Sketch (a.k.a. Springtime of Mini and Cheol-su), where he co-starred with South Korea's beloved female star Kang Soo-yeon, and which launched him into popularity. Unlike most other youth stars of his generation, he challenged himself by taking on a diverse range of roles, and achieving both critical and commercial success with starring in Park Kwang-su's social dramas Chilsu and Mansu (1988) and Black Republic (1990), Jang Sun-woo's A Short Love Affair (a.k.a. The Lovers of Woomook-baemi, 1990), and Lee Myung-se's romance My Bride My Love (1990).

In 1993, he returned from his studies in the U.S. to star opposite Ahn Sung-gi in Kang Woo-suk's action comedy Two Cops which became a big box office hit and spawned two sequels. His streak continued with comedies How to Top My Wife (1994) and Millions in My Account (1995), and with Jang Hyun-soo's action noir The Rules of the Game (1994). But it was his role as a detective in Lee Myung-se's _Nowhere to Hide+ (1999) that brought Park international recognition, and attracted attention of director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), who cast him opposite Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton in The Truth About Charlie (2002). Back in South Korea again, Park continued collaborations with some of the leading filmmakers, starring in Lee Joon-ik's Once Upon a Time in a Battlefield (2003) and Radio Star (2006), and also appearing in blockbuster Haeundae (2009). He was reunited with Kang Soo-yeon for the first time in 23 years in Im Kwon-taek's 101st film Hanji (2011), a mix of documentary and dramatic fiction.

Park has now turned his attention to directing, making an impressive debut Top Star (2013), which had its world premiere at the Busan International Film Festival last October, and which we present for the first time in North America. On this occasion, we will be honoring first-time director Park with the inaugural The Celebrity Award at the New York Asian Film Festival.

Born in Seoul in 1976, Shin Yeon-shick comes from a Spanish studies background. Opting for a filmmaking career, he made his directorial debut (Piano Lesson) in 2002 on a micro-budget ($300), before fully dedicating himself to cinema. In 2005, he directed the black-and-white indie A Great Actor, which had its international premiere at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. With The Fair Love (2009), a nuanced, offbeat inter-generational romance featuring Ahn Sung-ki and Lee Ha-na, Shin received considerable critical acclaim and gained a wider, more mainstream audience. In 2012, the ambitious art house drama The Russian Novel earned him the Vision Section Director Award at the Busan International Film Festival.

With Rough Play (2013), which is presented for the first time in New York, director Shin, working with pop star Lee Joon, takes a story written by Kim Ki-duk, and goes behind the scenes of the Korean film industry, showing what few would dare to show, and exploring both the darker side of acting and actors, as well as the dirt behind the glamor of the silver screen.

His latest film, The Avian Kind, recently had its world premiere at the Jeonju International Film Festival

Sol Kyung-gu is an absolute powerhouse of an actor who has a career that spans both serious minded art house and festival fare, as well as more mainstream films. He has consistently embodied some of the most memorable roles in Korean film on the screen for the last 18 years. After graduating from Hanyang University in 1994 he starred in several hit stage shows including Sam Shepard's True West and the Korean adaptation of German rock musical Line 1. First appearing on film in Jang Sun-woo's classic A Petal in 1996, Sol quickly went from small roles to breakout ones in Rainbow Trout and more notably, in Lee Chang-dong's Peppermint Candy in 2000. His career-defining role in that film earned him all the major South Korean cinema prizes from Baeksang Arts Awards, Grand Bell Awards, and the Blue Dragon Film Awards.

Sol began to appear in a mixture of more serious features and genre pictures, and cemented himself as one of the most sought after actors in South Korea. In 2002 alone he starred in Public Enemy (a brutal cop thriller), Jail Breakers (a prison comedy), Oasis (another Lee Chang-dong film that won Sol even more awards), and The Bird Who Stops in the Air (an art house drama). Like some of the best actors, Sol often finds himself gaining and losing weight to embody his roles, and goes from growling animalistic intensity to delicate vulnerability.

This year we're showing two new films that show this dynamic range, Cold Eyes and Hope, as well as the modern classic Public Enemy. The range that Sol shows in these films going from the brutal and driven Kang Chul-joong in Public Enemy, to the calculating Detective Hwang in Cold Eyes, and finally to the devastated father desperately trying to make ends meet and reconnect with his daughter after a brutal assault in Hope, underscores why we are presenting Sol Kyung-gu with the Star Asia Award.

Umin Boya (also known by his Chinese name Ma Chih-hsiang) is half-aborigine on his father's side. He first came to prominence in Wang Shau-di's TV series Big Hospital, Little Doctor (2000) and went on to star in the drama series Crystal Boys (2003) and Banquet (2004), picking up Golden Bell Award nominations along the way. He has written and directed three award-winning short films, and has been seen in various Taiwanese feature films such as Sylvia Chang's 20 30 40 (2004), Yang Ya-che's Orz Boyz (2008) and Wei Te-sheng's Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (2011). Kano is his directorial debut

In the 1960s the Shaw Brothers were looking to expand from their more traditional dramas and romances to martial arts films, and one of their hires was a former water polo champion, horse rider and car racer: Jimmy Wang. Appearing in films like Temple of the Red Lotus, Twin Swords, Magnificent Trio and Tiger Boy at the beginning of his career, his true breakthrough came in Chang Chen's landmark The One-Armed Swordsman (1967), the film that launched Wang's career as well as the martial arts swordfighting movie (wuxia pian) craze. With all the fury and masculine intensity exploding from the screen, Wang became the prototype for the tough stoic male characters that this new wave of swordfighting films brought to the screen.

If The One-Armed Swordsman launched Wang into stardom, it was The Chinese Boxer (1970) that cemented his legendary status by igniting the kung fu fever that was to become a global phenomenon. Written, directed, and starring Wang, The Chinese Boxer was the first major movie to devote itself entirely to the art of kung fu. It established the basic conventions, such as revenge as a motive, Chinese martial arts versus Japanese martial arts, and strong nationalistic feeling, all of which later found their way into the films of Bruce Lee. Following this film, Wang broke his contract with Shaw Brothers and started making films in Taiwan with Golden Harvest, including his masterpiece Beach of the War Gods (1973), described by scholar Stephen Teo as "the swordfighting movie to end all swordfighting movies."

Wang is currently enjoying an Indian Summer in his long career, with outstanding roles in Peter Chan's Wu Xia (aka Dragon, 2011), and Andrew Lau's The Guillotines (2012). Most recently, he starred in Chung Mong-hong's arty slasher Soul (2013), turning it into a showcase for his acting talent, where with hardly a change in facial expression, he's able to summon up a whole range of emotions (sadness, paternal love, madness). With a career spanning over five decades, he has acted in over 80 films, directed 12 films and left an indelible mark on the history of martial arts cinema. For all of these accomplishments it is our deepest honor to present Jimmy Wang with our Lifetime Achievement Award, and to screen three of his films at this year's Festival (The One-Armed Swordsman, The Chinese Boxer, and Soul).