PING PONG PLAYA – Doc Helmer Jessica Yu’s New Feature

I remember it like it was yesterday… quite possibly the greatest Oscar acceptance speech ever: “You know you’ve entered new territory when you realize your outfit costs more than your film.”

Alongside Palance’s one-armed push up and Benigni’s “Vita é bella” frolic around the Shrine, Jessica Yu placed herself among Academy Awards lore with that witty little one-liner when she took home Oscar for her doc short BREATHING LESSONS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF MARK O’BRIEN. Years later, Jessica Yu is taking her comedic touch into the feature world with her debut fiction narrative, PING PONG PLAYA.  PING PONG PLAYA premiered yesterday at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The screenplay was written by Jessica Yu and Jimmy Tsai (shown here with film producers), who plays C-dub in the film. This is Tsai’s first acting job; as Yu shared with the audience after the screening, Tsai is an accountant. Never did he dream that he’d be playing the lead role in his first screenplay. Yu is well known for her documentary background. In this first feature, she continues to make her audience laugh at all the right places. Yu mentioned that making the transition from documentary to narrative film was not too difficult. She enjoyed the collaborative process, which is slightly different from documentary.

Now, Jessica Yu has been directing documentaries for years (IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL and LIVING MUSEUM are highly recommended for all you doc fans), that’s no new news, but her fictional chops have also been at work; Yu has directed episodes of Grey’s Antaomy, ER and The West Wing, to name a few of her non-doc endeavors.

Looking forward to hearing more about this PING PONG PLAYA and hopefully checking it out later this year with its release.

Check out the paddle-scrumptious PING PONG PLAYA website here.

Props to the TIFF doc blog.

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