Photo credit is Derek Howard
The Norwegian/US Netflix Original feature doc Sisters on Track by Corinne van der Borch and Tone Grøttjord-Glenne tells the heart-warming story of three siblings (initially aged 9-12) whose prowess in running shoes is matched only by their indomitable charm and spirit, and by the guidance given them by a single mum and an inspirational coach.
We first meet New Yorkers Brooke (9), Rainn (11) and Tai (12) Sheppard after they have just won medals at the 2016 Junior Olympics, a feat which catapulted them onto the front cover of top US magazine Sports Illustrated. What made the achievement particularly noteworthy was that the previous year they had been evicted from their apartment, together with their mother Tonia, and were living in a homeless shelter.
The film cleverly pitches in with the headline stuff early, because what happens next is the stuff of fantasy. During a television interview with the family on the Whoopi Goldberg show, it is announced that actor/producer/philanthropist Tyler Perry will donate an apartment rent-free for the next two years that will help the family get back on track and provide the stability the girls need to develop.
Thereafter, we follow the girls as they live their deliciously normal life of growing up, learning about the world, getting their grades, dancing, singing, developing crushes…and running of course, always with an eye on the prize as they compete in increasingly prestigious events.
Because in that department they have Coach Jean (who is actually a judge) watching their back, giving both advice and support by the bucketload, but also prepared to give them the hairdryer treatment when they step out of line either in the athletics club or indeed at school. Because for Jean what is of equal, nay greater, importance is that her charges develop to their full potential in all aspects of life, and that means educationally, professionally and within their personal undertakings.
There is lots of track action (punctuated by a fabulous choreographed warm-up motif reminiscent of the skipping girls in Malcolm McLaren’s Double Dutch video) and much home action, revising, school work, birthday parties et al, plus funny, revealing and moving interviews with the sisters as well as Coach Jean and mum Tonya, who must find both a job and the time to consider romance in her life.
Co-director Corinne van der Borch is Dutch but has been living in New York for the past fifteen years (her first feature doc Girl With Black Balloons was about the oldest resident of the city’s iconic Chelsea Hotel).
She got to know the story of the girls in 2016 through a friend who met Tonia at a fundraiser organised for her by friends at the gym. Yes, the timing was perfect, just as the story of the girls was “at the precipice of the big media national media picking it up,” but she still he needed to convince Coach Jean at whose coaching facilities much of the shooting would be taking place.
“Coach Jean being a judge took a close look at me,” says Van der Borch, who was determined to underline her credentials and integrity as a filmmaker. “I showed up and introduced myself and we started talking on the track and we had a long conversation, and I told her ‘when you make documentaries it’s not just a journalist that comes in and out’.” This was going to be a lengthy endeavour and she was in for the long haul.
Norwegian co-director Tone Grøttjord-Glenne picks up the story a little further down the line, and tells of the moment when she and Van der Borch knew they were really onto something with their film.
“We filmed together, Corinne and I for about two years, and followed the girls and really got to know them and what the story was about and the core of everything,” she says. “Just before we did our first international pitch we were on the bus with the girls in Brooklyn and there was a mom on the bus who came up to us with her two daughters and said, ‘are you the sisters that I have seen on TV, and Rainn was like ‘yeah’, and then the mom started to cry. She said ‘it means so much for us to see someone from our neighbourhood go so far. It’s so important for my daughters to see.’ And that’s when we understood that we really needed to get the best reach that we can, because this film can really make a difference for other young people.”
“Then just two months later we had the opportunity to pitch to Netflix and they really loved the story from the first moment,” Grøttjord-Glenne adds. “That was in 2018 and was a really great time for us to pitch because it was at a moment when we had developed our story, and the form and the visual language and where we wanted it [to be] and what we wanted to tell with the story, so we could really quickly check out if Netflix was interested in telling the same story as we were interested in telling. And they were, we could really feel that. That is always the best starting point for a good collaboration.”
The co-directors pitched their project in 2018 at DOC Norway in Bergen where they first met Netflix’s Sarafina di Felice, at which point “the conversation started.” Soon afterwards they pitched at the main FORUM at IDFA, at which point the film became a Netflix Original courtesy of the streamer’s Kate Townsend.
Even though Sisters on Track works as an antidote to such sporting docs as Athlete A (Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk), in which the coach is revealed as a sexual predator, or Marta Prus’ Over the Limit, about the excessive coaching methods deployed to train Russian Olympic gymnasts, neither Van der Borch nor Tone Grøttjord-Glenne think of their film as an ostensibly sports doc.
“The sports thing is the framework of the film but the heart and the soul is the human story of the girls,” says Grøttjord-Glenne. “I think what was most attractive to Corinne and I was Coach Jean and her engagement with young people. I think maybe that ‘changemaker’ subject or ‘being someone for someone else’ was more what drew us into telling the story.”
“Yes the idea of sisterhood, a community and overcoming adversity, the coming-of-age side of it,” agrees Van der Borch.
“At Sant and Usant (Norwegian production company) we have made a lot of films about young people and very often young people who struggle very heavily [but are] part of an uplifting story,” says Grøttjord-Glenne, who directed the highly moving All That I Am (2020) about child abuse.
“Of course there are heavy backdrops in Sisters on Track too, but I think to be part of a story that is so joyful and where there is so much love, and somebody really wanting to do something good for somebody else, was what drew us to tell the story.”
