 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.