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.

Together with director Dante Lam, producer Candy Leung is responsible for pushing the technical possibilities of Chinese-language cinema. When Lam started working as an assistant director in the early 1990s, Leung was already working as his production manager. For the past 14 years, they have been inseparable as director-and-producer partners. Outside of her working relationship with Lam, Leung produced several independent films, including new director omnibus Heroes in Love (2001) and Alex Law's drama Echoes of the Rainbow (2010). She has already signed three new contracts with investors for upcoming films to be directed by Lam.