Paris-based director and screenwriter Olivier Assayas began his career in the late ’70s as a writer for the influential French film journal Cahiers du cinéma. In the early ’80s, Assayas collaborated on two screenplays with director Andre Téchiné and ghostwrote several episodes of the TV series Les conquêtes du commissaire Maigret for his ailing father, filmmaker Jacques Rémy, before making his feature-film debut in 1986 with Désordre. In the ensuing years, he became one of the leading lights of French cinema with motion pictures such as Irma Vep (1996), Demonlover (2002), Clean (2004), and Summer Hours [L’heure d’été] (2008). His five-and-a-half-hour telefilm Carlos (2010) won the Golden Globe Award for Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television. Three of Assayas’s films have been nominated for the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, and he has made a number of acclaimed documentaries, including HHH (1997), a portrait of Chinese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien. In 2017, Assayas presided over the annual Locarno Film Festival.

Director, writer, and producer Stacy Cochran received a B.A. from Williams College and an M.F.A. in filmmaking from Columbia University. She has made four feature films: Write When You Get Work (2018), Drop Back Ten (2000), Boys (1996), and My New Gun (1993), which was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature in the same year of release. She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art from 2006–2014 and the head of its Program Advisory Committee. Cochran lives in New York City.