“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success
Almost There
Genre: Sports Drama, Coming-of-age
Length: 122 pages
Language: English (also translated to a Chinese version)
Location: China
Logline:
A hard-working young girl in the Chinese National Badminton Team reveals her desire to win in the try-out of Sudirman Cup. But the cruel ecosystem in the sports world gives her a hard lesson, which makes her question her capability and her passion for badminton.
Writer Statement:
I don’t fulfill any stereotypes you can think of for a writer.
Growing up in a sports family and having been a professional badminton player for ten years before college, the sports team has been my second home. I didn't grow up reading tons of books, nor do I consider myself qualified as a film nerd. My background often makes me feel not artistic enough to be a writer. But, growing up, I knew that I had too many things in my head, and I needed a medium to spit it out. Tying on the keyboard just happened to be the easiest skill my clumsy fingers could acquire to complete the task for my brain.
Writing a story about the world of badminton felt like creating a collage of all the happy and painful memories in my ten-year athletic career. Nurtured under the Chinese sports system, I can't help but consider my incapability to reach the top a failure. In a traditional storytelling framework, a sports drama is often a journey about an underdog learning, growing, overcoming obstacles, and eventually achieving a goal. But that’s a fantasy I can't convince myself to believe in. One of the most important things that sports have taught me is the cruelty of reality. But, the more important thing is that it taught me how to live with failures. ALMOST THERE is a story about how an athlete failed and learned to deal with the failure. The story is depressing. But the core idea is optimistic. Xin’ya’s story will tell you the world is cruel, but it’s OK.
The randomness of life is also an idea I want to explore in the movie. The story tells you that working hard doesn’t necessarily lead to success. Xin’ya is not the hero that is typically depicted in other sports dramas, since there are so many things that are out of her control. She’s also not a character that needs our pities. Along with her growth, I wish my audience would learn to understand the randomness of life with Xin’ya.