Directorial Career
Part of the first class to reenter the Beijing Film Academy in 1978 (along with Fifth Generation helmers Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang and Chen Kaige), Ning Ying's career veered away from the path of her male counterparts when she was allowed to study abroad in Italy's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. While in Italy, she met Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, whom she would act as an assistant director for in the 1987 epic The Last Emperor.
Her own career first reached international prominence with 1993's For Fun (also known as Looking for Fun), which would become the first of Ning Ying's "Beijing Trilogy," a loosely tied grouping of films that all take place in Beijing — the other two films being the black comedy, On the Beat and the drama, I Love Beijing. Together, the films are an analysis of the massive changes that China's national capital has undergone in the recent decades.
In 2003, the trilogy was shown in its entirety by the Harvard Film Archive in an event touted as "From China with Love: The Films of Ning Ying."
Ning followed her Beijing trilogy with a full-length documentary, Railroad of Hope in 2002, which followed the mass migration of cheap labor throughout China. The film managed to win the Grand Prix du Cinema du Reel in 2002.
In 2005, she made Perpetual Motion, which premiered in several major film festivals, notably Venice and Toronto.
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