Born in Beijing in 1959, Ning Ying was admitted to the Beijing Film Academy in 1978 together with many of the filmmakers of China’s Fifth Generation. She left China for Italy in 1980 and completed her film training at the Rome Film Experimental Academy in 1986. After returning to China in 1987, she worked as Bernardo Bertolucci’s assistant director for The Last Emperor. She made her directorial debut with Someone Loves Just Me, and then directed her “Beijing Trilogy”: For Fun, On the Beat, and I Love Beijing. Together, the films are an analysis of the massive changes that China’s national capital had undergone over the previous decades. Ning started venturing into documentaries with a series of shorts for UNICEF. Her first feature-length documentary Railroad of Hope, which follows the mass migration of cheap labor between Sichuan and Xinjiang, won the Grand Prize at the 2002 Cinema du Réel festival in Paris.

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