''Top Spin'' is a 2014 feature-length

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional film, motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". Bill Nichols (film critic), Bil ...

directed by Mina T. Son and Sara Newens. It follows the road to the

2012 Summer Olympics The 2012 Summer Olympics (officially the Games of the XXX Olympiad and also known as London 2012) was an international multi-sport event held from 27 July to 12 August 2012 in London, England, United Kingdom. The first event, the ...

of three American

table tennis Table tennis, also known as ping-pong and whiff-whaff, is a sport in which two or four players hit a lightweight ball, also known as the ping-pong ball, back and forth across a table using small solid rackets. It takes place on a hard table div ...

teenager players:

Ariel Hsing Ariel Yenhua Hsing (born November 29, 1995) is an American table tennis player who competed in the 2012 Summer Olympics. Hsing became the youngest U.S. table tennis national champion in history in 2010 at age 15. She repeated as champion in ...

, Michael Landers, and

Lily Zhang Lily Ann Zhang (born June 16, 1996) is an American table tennis player who competed in the 2012 Summer Olympics in London with teammates Ariel Hsing and Erica Wu. She also competed in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio with teammates Jiaqi Zheng ...

. ''Top Spin'' has been premiered at the 2014 DOC NYC. The documentary has won the Audience Award and was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2015 CAAMFest. It also won awarded for Best Editing and was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature at the 2015

Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (LAAPFF) – formerly known as VC FilmFest – is an annual film festival presented by Visual Communications (VC). It was established in 1983 by Linda Mabalot as a vehicle to promote Asian Pacific Ameri ...

. ''Top Spin'' was also nominated for the Documentary Competition at the 2015

Nashville Film Festival The Nashville Film Festival (NashFilm), held annually in Nashville, Tennessee, is the oldest running film festival in the South and one of the oldest in the United States. In 2016, Nashville Film Festival received more than 6,700 submissions from ...

. It has a 100% rating, with an average score of 7/10 based on 9 reviews, on

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

. It has a rating of 81 on

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, stating "Universal acclaim based on 5 critics".

References

External links

* * 2014 films 2014 documentary films Documentary films about the Olympics Documentary films about sportspeople Table tennis at the 2012 Summer Olympics Table tennis films Films about the 2012 Summer Olympics 2010s English-language films {{sport-documentary-film-stub