How many 17-year-olds do you know of with their own Imdb page?

Christina Xing, who calls Mountain Brook home but transferred to a Michigan-based filmmaking school her junior year, has one. And her Internet Movie Database profile was just updated with the biggest accomplishment of her young career.

Christina's short film, "Goldfish," won Best Drama Oct. 9 at the All American High School Film Festival in New York City. She was also a finalist for Best Director, Female Rising Filmmaker, Best Overall Picture and the Black Magic Pitch Competition.

The movie tells the story of an awkward girl who wears swimming goggles all the time after a near-drowning incident in which her goggles fell off. Awkward and a loner, she's forced into a collaborating with a boy in a class project to raise a goldfish.

The boy doesn't want anything to do with the weird girl who wears goggles, but slowly they develop a bond and he reveals that, despite his outward popular kid appearance, he's lonely too. Eventually, the friendship and the fish help the girl face her fears and toss the goggles.

Christina's talent is apparent in the film, which has professional looking cinematography and dialogue and acting by teens that is smooth and natural.

Speaking of that Imdb page, it's pretty impressive. Among the accomplishments it lists: District and State wins in the Alabama Trambauer Secondary Theatre Festival; being the youngest ever summer intern at Alabama Public Television at the age of 15; Film screenings at the Omaha Film Festival, the International Student Film Festival in Hollywood, the Corona Fast Net Short Film Festival in Ireland, and more.

She's already studied film at the University of Southern California, and is currently studying at the Interlochen Arts Academy for Motion Picture Arts in Michigan.

In her profile in the online video site, Vimeo, Christina said she prefers writing and directing dramas.

"I tried like writing scripts about space exploration, explosives and cowboys and stuff. It's fun, but it just didn's ever feel as real and I want to make a film that is really real," she said. "I like to find meaning. That's just what I am."

After her big win in New York, Christina, who is of Chinese heritage, will soon debut her film in China. She announced on Facebook this week that it had been accepted at the Second Asia International Short-Film Exhibition in Wenzhou, China.

In honor of that accomplishment, she released "Goldfish" to the public on YouTube on Friday.

So how did someone so young become an accomplished filmmaker? Sometimes motivation comes in the form of a slight.

Christina describes herself as a bit of a rebel, having felt dismissed as a female of Chinese heritage. When she was in in the fourth grade, her teacher was asking everyone what they wanted to do when they grew up. The first boy who answered said he wanted to be an artist. The second boy wanted to be an astronaut.

"She asked me what I wanted to be and I said, 'I want to be a filmmaker.'," Christina said. "She told me, 'That's really cute, but what do you really want to be when you grow up?'"

"And I think in that moment, as a fourth grader I kind of, like, realized, like, 'So why is it OK for that kid to be an astronaut and that other kid to be an artist, but it's not OK for me to want to be a filmmaker? Doesn't that seem more realistic than an astronaut?

"I think about that moment a lot."

In fourth grade, she had already begun writing screenplays "about my own personal struggles in life.

" I wasn't a popular kid at all growing up. I was kind of what you would call, the ugly duckling of the bunch. So I turned to writing comedies, because imagine a world where you can't learn to laugh at yourself or laugh through struggles. That's really when I caught the film-making bug majorly."

She moved to Mountain Brook from New Jersey in the 5th grade, and she's been proving that fourth grade teacher wrong ever since.

"When I was in Mountain Brook, I started seriously making films around 7th or 8th grade. I was lucky to have a great teacher (Shout out to Ms. Flowers) who really supported me and helped me grow as a filmmaker. And a close group of friends that would act and help me make my films," she said. "If you ask anyone in my class about me, they'd probably tell you the only thing I talked or knew anything about was movies. I just lived and breathed it at my time there."

Christina said she's created or worked on 48 short films in "in my 17 years of life."

"Most of them were God awful, but I mean. That's how one learns right?"

"Goldfish" is still awaiting response from 17 other film festivals "so its festival run is still swimming actively," she said.

"And as for me .... I just want to create something beautiful," she said. "That's all I've ever wanted and I'm happy that people are able to watch my films and really enjoy them and hopefully transport in to a different lifetime, or feel less alone. I learned and took so much from film, I think it's important to give back and offer people the chance to really live vicariously through my work or characters. After all, that's what filmmaking is. Dreaming for a living."

Haskins takes a weekly look at points of pride statewide. Email your suggestions to shaskins@al.com, or tweet them to @Shelly_Haskins using #AlabamaProud