Pai Ching-jui traveled to Italy in 1960 and enrolled in the prestigious Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome in 1962, becoming the first Chinese student ever admitted to the institution. He graduated in 1963 with an experimental short film, Un Amore (鐘情者痴), which he wrote and directed himself — a playful work staging a "love scene" between an actor and a camera. He remains the first Taiwanese filmmaker to have studied cinema in Italy.