About the Director

Austrian-Chinese director, screenwriter and producer C.B. Yi was born in China but immigrated to Austria as a teen. He studied at the Vienna Film Academy under the guidance of Michael Hanekeand Christian Berger. A Sinology major, he first encountered the topic of gay prostitution nearly two decades ago while studying abroad to improve his language skills at the Beijing Film Academy, where he discovered that a classmate was hustling on the side to help his ill mother. Yi first planned a documentary about money boys, but later morphed it into a fiction over concerns that it might put subjects at risk in a country where prostitution remains illegal and there are few legal rights for LGBTQIA+ citizens.