For Mina Son and Sara Newens, the debut of their film "Topspin" at the DOC NYC film festival on Nov. 15 was both a relief and cause for celebration. The pair of filmmakers, who met while enrolled in Stanford University's MFA film program in 2010, had been working on the full-length documentary for more than three years.
It was a huge career milestone and a thrill to reveal their work to the public. It was also finally finished.
The story of three American teenage table-tennis prospects and their attempts to qualify for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London took Son and Newens around the globe -- tournaments in North Carolina, Mexico and central Europe, a trip to a Chinese ping-pong training center, and finally, the Games themselves after two of their three protagonists made the Olympic team.
"We filmed in five different countries, so especially for a first feature-length documentary, that's probably on the high side, and then of course, we flew all over the U.S.," says Son.
Ariel Hsing and Lily Zhang, friendly rivals and sometime training partners from northern California, made it through the multi-tiered North American qualifying process in the winter of 2012 to earn a berth to London, while Michael Landers of Long Island, N.Y. fell just short of the Games. Their struggles and successes roll out over 80 minutes that document about two years in their lives, as they train, play tournaments, overcome injuries and deal with the pressure of trying to balance high school with high-level competition.
Today, all three are in college. Zhang is the most active competitor, having recently returned from the World Junior championship in Shanghai, where she advanced to the round of 16 in singles -- not a bad feat for someone also in the middle of her freshman year at the University of California. Landers, a student at NYU, spent the last semester studying abroad in Prague. Hsing, a sophomore at Princeton, is deeply involved in college life in New Jersey, tackling economics, finance, writing and computer science classes and the challenge of being her class' social chair. She still plays ping-pong on the university's club team, and helped Princeton win last spring's women's college title while claiming the individual championship herself.
"The 2016 Olympics are definitely still part of my dream. I'll need to schedule accordingly during the trials time. Give myself a lot of time to practice beforehand. But it's definitely still there," Hsing says. "This year I'm taking a step back from the international stage, because it's really hard on my academics when I do go out to play a tournament. I'll keep practicing. Every break when I come back [home] I play with my coaches."
The girls attended the documentary's premiere in New York and were impressed by the production. Not everyone gets to see a replay of their adolescence on the big screen.
"I thought they did such an amazing job. The movie made me cry. I remember watching it the first time, I was completely blown away," says Hsing, who exceeded expectations by advancing to the round of 32 at the 2012 Games. "It was kind of like re-living the entire experience again."
The highlights of the film include Hsing and Zhang winning their matches that led to their Olympic berths, Landers' disappointment after falling short of his goal of making the team and Hsing's impressive performance in London. Hours of behind-the-scenes footage were edited to give viewers a sense of how these young athletes tried their best to live like regular teenagers -- painting their nails with friends, playing with the family dog, and going to school functions.
For those who might have only seen them at tournaments, it's an interesting look into the challenges of being a teenage athlete. For example, Landers seemed to exist on only on chicken, candy and cereal from Costco during a multi-week trip to San Jose for a training boost before the trials. He finished high school via online classes, while Hsing and Zhang did their best to keep up with their studies in more traditional settings -- albeit doing lots of homework on the road.
Aside from that festival debut, Son says she is looking for other opportunities to showcase the film so that it might be purchased by a distributor. But the commercial viability of such niche productions is small. The filmmakers raised over $100,000 via a couple different Kickstarter campaigns, but weren't able to cover the film's full budget and couldn't pay themselves a salary.
"Documentaries in general, they just don't make money," says Son, who is 35, like Newens. "If you break it down -- how much work we put in to it over four years, the chances of us getting that return, it probably won't happen. In re-evaluating our goals, the most important thing was to establish our careers and have this be that calling card to prove to people that we can make a film and we're capable."
Now that they've done one film, Son and Newens hope the next one will be easier, from both a funding and production standpoint. And they are anticipating more sports stories, too.
"One of the reasons Sara and I were attracted to this topic was that we're huge sports fans. That was an immediate draw, and if we have an opportunity to do another sports film we would jump at it. One of my documentary filmmaker heroes is Steve James, and I loved "Hoop Dreams." We wanted to [show] women can tell sports stories and make it exciting," says Son. "We received good feedback from [potential funders] but ultimately because it wasn't a hard-hitting social issue, [getting grants] was a lot more difficult than we thought. But we believed this film could still offer a really interesting human experience, revealing the psychology of young champions and even show different kinds of parenting styles. They're all interesting topics that can add value to society."
"Top Spin" was also shown over the Thanksgiving weekend during a tournament near Washington, D.C. and will find itself on screens in San Francisco, one of the hottest spots for table tennis in the U.S., on March 14 and 22. Son and Newens are still deciding whether to self-publish the film, but they are preparing for that possibility with a pre-order tab on the topspinmovie.com website.
"[The players] are hoping this brings much-needed attention to the sport. From the table-tennis community, there's been a nice response. So that's been good," says Son.