An Evening with Writer/Director Ningyi Sun Screening + Conversation: Real Stories, Real Stakes
Ningyi Sun never went to film school. She started making films while working for the United Nations in the Central African Republic, taught herself as she went, and has spent the years since building a practice rooted in deep research and long-term relationships with the people she films.
This evening is both a showcase of that work and an open conversation about what independent filmmaking looks like when you find your own way in — across a documentary, a narrative short, and the interview series feeding the feature she's building next.
SCREENINGS
Eat Bitter (2023) — Feature Documentary, 52-min broadcast cut
The version aired by the BBC. Ningyi's debut feature follows a Chinese construction manager and a Central African sand digger in their parallel pursuits of independence and happiness in Bangui, Central African Republic. Supported by the Sundance Documentary Institute, Ford Foundation, Chicken & Egg, Hot Docs Blue Ice Fund, IDFA Bertha Fund, and NYSCA, it premiered at CPH:DOX 2023 and has since screened at DOC NYC, Hot Docs, Atlanta Film Festival, DMZ Docs, and the Shanghai International Film Festival.
The Life (2026, 15 min) — Narrative Short
On the 40th Road in Flushing, Queens, Chinese immigrant sex workers navigate survival, agency, and what it means to build a life in America on their own terms. The film grew from three years of research — including visits with the family of Song Yang, a Chinese woman who fell to her death during a 2017 police sting — and ongoing conversations with workers and clients in the Flushing community. It's the foundation for AMP, the narrative feature Ningyi is now developing. The feature script is a quarter-finalist in the 2024 Academy Nicholl Fellowships and advanced to second-round consideration in the 2026 Sundance Development Track.
法拉盛私语 / Anonymous Conversations from Flushing — ~10 min
An ongoing project Ningyi is building toward AMP: recorded conversations with the sex workers and clients of Flushing's erotic massage parlors. A selection of short excerpts.
CONVERSATION (45 min)
After the screenings, Ningyi sits down with a fellow filmmaker to talk about:
— Making a debut feature in the Central African Republic: the chaos, the beauty, and the education no film school provides.
— The leap from documentary to narrative — why she made it, and what she had to unlearn.
— How she earns trust from the people whose lives rarely reach the screen with dignity: sex workers, migrants, grieving families.
WHO IT'S FOR
Filmmakers finding their own path outside conventional routes, anyone close to the worlds these films portray, and audiences drawn to true-to-life stories of migration, ambition, independence, and survival.
Follow A.M.P. as it develops: @AMP feature film