Zero to Hero

Wan Chi-Man's 2021 Hong Kong film tells the life of So Wa Wai, the city's first Paralympic gold medallist. Left with cerebral palsy by a complication at birth, So learns to run and enters competition at his mother's insistence. The centre of the story is not the athlete but his mother; the film is really about a mother being both support and pressure to her child. Sandra Ng's performance refuses to make the mother a self-sacrificing saint: she is sometimes cruel, sometimes loading her own ambition onto the child. That honesty separates the film from the inspirational sports template. Its limit is the intensity of the emotional pressure in the second half and a representation of disability that slides in places toward easy answers. Who it's for: viewers who like Hong Kong cinema, sports biography and mother and child drama. Who it's not for: anyone sensitive to how disability is represented, or who will find the dose of emotional manipulation excessive.