I Love Beijing

Ning Ying always filmed in Peking with a preference for people and institutions that seem to be on the verge of extinction. For instance, For Fun was about the ageing doorman of the Peking Opera, who founded his own amateur opera company. And in On the Beat, a local policeman hunts a rabid stray dog, resulting in a comic portrait of bureaucracy, boredom and frustration. Ning Ying loves Peking, but a frank declaration of love in the form of a film title made the authorities frown. It might me meant sarcastically…That fear is not entirely unjustified. In Nings film, Peking is an overwhelming mass of energy, constantly in motion, in which you could easily lose yourself and that is both familiar and alienating. The film follows the wanderings of a taxi-driver who chases after love pathetically after being divorced from his wife. According to leading actor Yu Ailei, Chinese taxi-drivers, and especially those from Peking, are more interesting than anyone else. They sit in their cars for sixteen hours a day and listen to the radio all the time, so they have an opinion on everything. Yu’s character does not really have an aim in life. He does have a great capacity for self-mockery, which gives the film a pleasant kind of humour. I Love Beijing has a loose, informal narrative structure in which, as always with Ning, strikingly naturalistic and realistic moments can pop up.