A gentle cinematic portrait which starts with a rendition of the song ‘Mack the Knife’ and ends with sounds of Peking opera, Ning Ying’s second feature film is an exquisite work encompassing the idea of a contemporary Beijing. Recently retired from his longtime job as the manager of an opera house, Mr. Han remains attached to opera and misses the regimented life of his former self. In search of identity and community, he frequents with a group of opera amateurs and starts to organize them into a motley troupe, to mixed results. Co-written with her sister Ning Dai, For Fun is the first work in her Beijing Trilogy, in which Ning Ying trains her humanistic, realistic lens upon ordinary people of different generations as they contend with the minutiae and the existential in daily life.

The screening on 13 January will be followed by a conversation between Ning Ying and M+ Curator Chanel Kong in Mandarin.

Ning Ying (b.1959, Beijing) is a prominent Chinese filmmaker who studied at the Beijing Film Academy alongside Fifth and Sixth Generation filmmakers, such as Zhang Yimou and Jia Zhangke. She then went on to study abroad at the National School of Cinema in Italy, where she eventually became an assistant director on Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987). Acclaimed for her humanistic portraits of contemporary Chinese life, Ning is best known for her Beijing Trilogy, which comprises of For Fun (1992), On the Beat (1995), and I Love Beijing (2001).