Ping Pong

Filmmaker brothers Anson and Hugh Hartford's delightful PBS-aired POV documentary Ping Pong focuses on a handful of international participants in the World Over 80s Table Tennis Championships. The subjects—ranging in age from 81 to 100, and hailing from England, Germany, Finland, Australia, and the U.S.—travel to Hohhot, China (in Inner Mongolia), where in the geriatric equivalent of the ping pong senior Olympics their remarkable table tennis skills are rewarded with coveted medals. The observational documentary style carries a sweet, personal tone that is both humorous and touching, never succumbing to the maudlin trap of old folks overcoming odds, etc. The marginal hero is a spry 89-year-old English gentleman with an irrepressibly sunny outlook and a fondness for spouting apt philosophical quotations and poetic verse. Other elderly ping pong pros include a ruthless player from Texas and a pair of German women who become her competitive nemeses, a centenarian who uses the sport as a way to combat dementia, and another champion from Britain battling cancer while continuing to wield his beloved wooden paddle. Extras include extended and deleted scenes. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (T. Fry)