Film | Pingpong

He sent the folder to his son. “This is from 1986,” he wrote. “I was the sound man.” His son replied three days later: “Cool. Do you want me to send you some money for a storage unit?”

The next day, he walked to the electronics market. A teenager sold him a USB film scanner for two hundred yuan. It took Chen three days to figure out how to connect it to the laptop he borrowed from a neighbor. He unspooled the film in his kitchen, the light carefully dimmed, and fed it through the scanner inch by inch. The process took nine hours. His hands trembled. The splices held. film pingpong

The man’s name was Chen, and for forty years, he had been the guardian of a single film reel. Not a famous film—no lost masterpiece of the silent era, no censored political screed. Just Pingpong , a 1986 documentary shot on 16mm, chronicling a season in the life of a provincial table tennis club. The club no longer existed. The building was a parking garage now. But the film remained, coiled in its metal canister like a sleeping snake. He sent the folder to his son

Chen sat in the watchtower until dusk. He remembered the thwock of the ball. He remembered Lin’s voice in his headphones, saying, “Hold, hold, hold.” He remembered the girl Li Jie, after the final scene, asking him if the film would make her famous. He had lied and said yes. Do you want me to send you some money for a storage unit