I Love Beijing

Born in Beijing, she spent her childhood during the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution. She studied cinema at Beijing Film Academy and later at Italy’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, where she met influential masters such as Fellini, Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci who appointed her as assistant director for his epic The Last Emperor. Soon after she began directing her own films for the Beijing Film Studio in China, and her works have won ample recognition from international film critics and festivals. In 2003 she has been fellow at Harvard University Asia Center. In 2005 she was awarded as “Cavaliere” by the President of the Republic of Italy. She’s been jury member of numerous international film festivals such as Berlin, Locarno, Torino, Yamagata, etc. She was nominated among 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005, by Peace Women Across the Globe association. She is currently living and working in Beijing where since 2008, besides her regular filmmaking activity, she leads the Film Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, School of City Design.

Ning Ying directed her first feature film in 1990, yet she is already the subject of numerous retrospectives: La Rochelle International Film Festival (France 2002); Jeonju Intl. Film Festival (Korea 2003); Harvard Film Archive and New York Asia Society (USA 2003); Asian Film Festival, Milan (Italy 2004); Cinematheque Ontario of Toronto Intl. Film Festival Group (Canada 2004) CinéMaVille Saint-Étienne (France 2005); Calendidonna, Udine (Italy 2007). Her film “On The Beat” was featured in NYWIFT (New York Women in Film & Television) anniversary program “The Feminine eye: Twenty years of women’s cinema ”, along with acclaimed directors like Claire Denis, Sally Potter, Margarethe Von Trotta, Jane Campion, etc.

“BEIJING TRILOGY” , composed by the long features For Fun (1992), On The Beat (1995) and I Love Beijing (2000), is her most important body of work made during the 90’s, pioneering the new urban generation of Chinese cinema that has emerged over the last decade. It represents quite a unique visual memory of Beijing city, capital and symbol of China, during ten crucial years of change, from the post-Mao era into a consumerist society. At the same time it portrays the ways of life and world-outlook of three generations of modern Chinese, exploring the physical and moral transformations of this Asian society. In Ning Ying’s own words: " I first set out to explore Beijing with the feature FOR FUN, a comedy about disappearing traditional ways of life. Later on, with the black-humored ON THE BEAT, I focused on the emerging new reality and the difficulty of coping with it. In I LOVE BEIJING, the magnitude of changes shaping our lives and the anxieties of the new generation, are represented in a rhapsody form, through the eyes of a young, restless taxi driver”.

In 2005 she produced and directed Wu Qiong Dong / PERPETUAL MOTION, that became immediately a cult-movie in China. At Venice International Film Festival it was welcome as a film that” marks undoubtedly a turning point as concerns the women’s image in Chinese cinema…It was also described as a “humorous and sophisticated” film according to the San Francisco Observer; and “a very different and rather surprising Chinese film” for FIPRESCI Festival Reports. It was presented at numerous international film festivals worldwide including Venice, Toronto, San Francisco, Vienna, etc. and has won the “Artistic Exploration Award” by China University Film Festival and the Award for “Most Original Film”, Roma Asian Film Festival 2006. The retrospective “New Chinese Cinema 1992/2007”, held at Rome’s PalaExpo in 2008, described it as “a revolutionary movie that shattered the cliches representing the oriental woman as a subjugated creature unable of fully expressing herself”.

Ning Ying also distinguished herself in the documentary field and in the realization of promotional-films for institutional and corporate communications.

Railroad of Hope (2001), her documentary film about internal mass-migrations in China, received the “Grand Prix du Cinema du Reel” in Paris 2002, was internationally broadcasted and also featured in contemporary art exhibitions, such as “Alors, la Chine? ”, Centre Pompidou Paris 2003, and “The People’s Republic”, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery 2004.

Her promotional-films successfully manage to conjugate a personal poetic point of view with informative content commissioned by a wide range of institutional and corporate users, starting with Duling-Turin (1996) commissioned by TURIN City Government in the occasion of “European Union Inter-Government Meeting of Turin 1996”. Also notable are In Our Own Words (2001) and Looking for a job in the city (2003), two programs for United Nations – UNICEF, depicting some urgent social issues of today’s China, such as “hiv/aids”, “women’s trafficking”, “street children”, “Gender discrimination”. Her video-work about 12 Asian architects project Commune by the Great Wall (2002) was presented at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. A Tenaris Project in China (2007) is her first work for a company listed in the “Fortune 500”. –Ning Ying Films