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Directors Amy Hill and Chris Riess were surprised to find the 94-year-old subject of their documentary “Hula Girl” just so cheerful despite missing out on becoming famous. In the late 1950s, Joan Anderson brought a bamboo hoop to the U.S. from her native Australia and then watched it become a national phenomenon — imagine the mid-20th-century version of the fidget spinner — but her name was nowhere in sight.

“There’s people who say woulda, coulda, shoulda over and over again and that ultimately destroys them,” Riess told TheWrap. “That never happened with Joan.”

“Hula Girl,” one of the finalists in TheWrap’s ShortList Film Festival, is both a heartwarming and cautionary tale about Anderson’s fight to let the world know she played a significant role in the popularity of the hula hoop.

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The late Wayne Deforest Anderson and Joan Anderson, now 94 and the oldest person featured in a film at Tribeca, were the couple who brought the original bamboo Hula Hoop to this country from Joan’s native country of Australia. In 1958, there was a handshake deal made with a Wham-o executive who was, at the time, a friend. That “friend” then went on to manufacture and monetize it, giving neither credit nor funds to the Anderson’s.

Sounds like Wham-o had their own version of Ray Kroc, McDonald’s founder who took the brothers Maurice “Mac” and Richard “Dick” McDonald idea and then pushed them aside to start the fast-food franchise across the country (and world).

Hula Girl, produced and directed by the husband/wife team of Amy Hill and Chris Riess is the (up until now) untold story behind one of the biggest fads in modern American history that began in 1958. At 94 years of age,...