The Roster

Filmmaking Team | Executive Producers

DIRECTOR & PRODUCER

debbie lum

Debbie Lum is a San Francisco-based filmmaker whose films give voice to the Asian American experience and other unsung stories. TRY HARDER! her most recent feature documentary is NY Times Critics Pick, premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival will broadcast on PBS’ Independent Lens during Spring 2022. The film received many accolades and is a Cinema Eye Honors Audience Choice Nominee, Winner of the Audience Award at the San Diego Film Asian Festival, Best Family Film at DocEdge in New Zealand and the Special Jury Prize for Inspiration at the Calgary International Film Festival, among others. Lum was nominated for the “Truer Than Fiction" Independent Spirit Award. Alongside a theatrical and wide release with community partners, the film team developed a campaign to promote student mental health and AAPI stories. Lum's previous feature documentary, SEEKING ASIAN FEMALE, premiered at SXSW Film Festival, was a “fan favorite” on PBS' Independent Lens, won Best of Fest (Silverdocs) and was featured in This American Life, among other awards. Lum’s editing credits include A.K.A DON BONUS (POV, Emmy-winner) and KELLY LOVES TONY (POV) among others. She’s also directed two short comedies, A Great Deal! and Chinese Beauty and is currently in development on a documentary called “My Tiger Mom” and producing, My Uncle The Fugitive, a personal political tale about modern Taiwanese democracy with director, Kathy Huang.

PRODUCER

nico opper

Nico Opper is an Emmy®-nominated director and producer who has been featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s annual “25 New Faces of Independent Film”, Indiewire Magazine’s “25 LGBT Filmmakers on the Rise”, and DOC NYC’s “40 Under 40” list of documentary talents. Their work has screened at The Tribeca Film Festival, Hot Docs, Los Angeles Film Festival, AFI Docs and Guadalajara Int’l Film Festival. Their debut feature film Off and Running premiered at Tribeca and received the Best Documentary Award at Outfest, The WGA Award for Best Documentary Screenplay and multiple audience awards. It aired on P.O.V. and was nominated for a national Emmy.

Their episodic series THE F WORD was nominated for a Gotham Award for Breakthrough Series and an IDA Award for Best Short Series, and named one of the best short form series of the year by Indiewire. Opper is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a 2020 Eureka Fellowship. They’re an alum of Film Independent, Tribeca Film Institute, Chicken and Egg Pictures, Point Foundation and NYU Film School.

CINEMATOGRAPHER

kathy huang

Kathy Huang is a Taiwanese-American filmmaker with a strong interest in issues of identity and belonging. Her feature-length directing debut, TALES OF THE WARIA, was funded by ITVS and the Center for Asian American Media, and follows a community of transgender women in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, as they search for romance and intimacy. The film received multiple Audience Choice Awards, and was broadcast nationally on PBS in 2012. She is currently working on GUANGZHOU LOVE STORY, a multi-year portrait of an African-Chinese family navigating a rising tide of nationalism and xenophobia in mainland China. Kathy received her Master's in Documentary Film Production from Stanford University and currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches filmmaking at UCLA and Chapman University.

EDITOR

andrew gersh

Andrew Gersh is an award-winning documentary film editor based in Portland, Oregon and the San Francisco Bay Area. His latest feature documentaries include CRIP CAMP: A Disability Revolution, winner of the Audience Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. CRIP CAMP was acquired by the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions and Netflix, and has been nominated for both Critics Choice and International Documentary Association Best Editing awards. For REAL BOY, he was awarded the Karen Schmeer Excellence in Documentary Editing Award at the 2016 Independent Film Festival Boston (IFFBoston 2016), and the James Lyons Editing Award For Documentary Feature at the 2016 Woodstock Film Festival. SPARK: A Burning Man Story premiered at the 2013 South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival, was an official selection to both Seattle International and Ashland Independent film festivals, and was the opening-night film of the 2013 San Francisco DocFest. THE REVOLUTIONARY OPTIMISTS was awarded the Hilton Worldwide LightStay Sustainability Award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and aired nationally on PBS’ Independent Lens, followed by ITVS Community Cinema screenings and a national theatrical release. The film was also nominated for a 2014 News and Documentary Emmy® Award.

Gersh also works regularly as an editorial consultant, and is a Sundance Institute Documentary Edit and Story Lab Fellow.

CO-PRODUCER & EDITOR

amy ferraris

Amy Ferraris is a filmmaker and editor whose feature editing credits include SEEKING ASIAN FEMALE and THE GRACE LEE PROJECT, both of which premiered at South by Southwest. Her work has enjoyed great success on the festival circuit, including at Tribeca, LAFF, True/False, DocNZ and AFIDocs, where it won "Best of Fest." She is currently a producer and editor on THE GATEKEEPER, a feature-length documentary that explores why math literacy is important on a large scale—for an equitable society and an engaged citizenry—and how we can transform math education toward those aims.

Ms. Ferraris' broadcast work has appeared on PBS, the Sundance Channel, the Discovery Networks, NatGeo, and A&E, among others. She is also the producer/director of THE PERFECT CAPPUCCINO, a feature documentary about coffee, consumerism, and being American. Ms. Ferraris currently lives in Oakland with her partner and their two children.

IMPACT PRODUCER

jin yoo-kim

Jin Yoo-Kim is a Korean Bolivian American producer and impact producer. She is currently producing MANZANAR, DIVERTED: WHEN WATER BECOMES DUST, a feature documentary exploring California water issues through the eyes of Native American, Japanese American WWII incarcerees, and environmentalists. She co-produced A WOMAN’S WORK: THE NFL’S CHEERLEADER PROBLEM, and K-TOWN ’92. Jin served as the digital engagement impact producer for WAKING DREAM (dir. Theo Rigby), a six episode series on America's young undocumented community for Indie Lens Storycast / PBS Digital Studios, and was the LA theatrical impact producer for BLOWIN' UP (dir. Stephanie Wang Breal), that looks inside a human trafficking intervention courtroom in Queens. She is a 2020-2021 Sundance Creative Producers Fellow, a 2020 Film Independent X CNN Original Series Docuseries Intensive Fellow, a 2020 Film Independent Doc Lab fellow, and was a 2017 Firelight Media Impact Producing Fellow. She received her MFA in Film & TV Production from USC and a BA in Psychology and Cinema & Media Studies from Wellesley College. 

IMPACT PRODUCER

rennie soga

Rennie Soga is the founder of Geist Productions based in Los Angeles that focuses on championing new narratives helping to shift power towards justice and equity. She served as Producer of INHERENT GOOD, the first U.S. documentary that explores the idea of Universal Basic Income and stars comedian Trae Crowder and 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang. The film was acquired by Fuse Media in 2021. In a previous life, Rennie spent several years at Facebook building and operationalizing the company's Platform and Media teams. She produced Facebook's first pop-up production studio in partnership with Siren Studios in Hollywood. Current impact projects are TRY HARDER! and SXSW 2022 Official Selection MAMA BEARS. She finds deep joy in her work that exists at the intersection of storytelling, community building, and activism.

IMPACT PRODUCER

un kyong ho

Un Kyong Ho was born in Pusan, South Korea, raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and currently calls the suburbs of Philadelphia home. She straddles the worlds of academia, community organizing, documentary filmmaking, and social impact producing. Un Kyong has helped produce award-winning documentaries for both film and television, including the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning PBS series A CHEF’S LIFE and the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary PRIVATE VIOLENCE. Her engagement work has addressed racial and economic justice, gender-based violence, sustainable food systems, and voting rights and election protection. Un Kyong is both a proud Midwesterner and proud product of public education. She is a forever Viking of Princeton High, holds a BA in History and German from Ohio University, and completed her JD/MA from the University of Cincinnati School of Law, where she focused her scholarly work on the intersections of intellectual property, food justice, and reproductive rights from a postcolonial, feminist lens. In all her work, Un Kyong is interested in uplifting and empowering marginalized, underrepresented communities, and using storytelling as a vehicle for positive social change. She is the mother of two and a regular attendee at her local school board meetings.

FIELD PRODUCER

lauren kawana

Lauren Kawana is an independent documentary producer from Honolulu, HI, currently based in Oakland, CA. Prior to reliving high school with students at Lowell as the field producer for TRY HARDER!, Lauren was associate producer for films like MIND/GAME: THE UNQUIET JOURNEY OF CHAMIQUE HOLDSCLAW, FREE: THE POWER OF PERFORMANCE, and outreach coordinator for DOGTOWN REDEMPTION. In 2014, she directed her first documentary short, LIVE, BREATHE, HULA, a portrait of Native Hawaiian musician and kumu hula Mark Keali'i Ho'omalu. Lauren most recently served as a unit production manager on National Geographic's IMPACT, a women-focused docuseries executive produced by Gal Gadot, and is currently developing and co-producing WOMAN 2.0, a docuseries on women's health.

COMPOSER

diana salier

Diana Salier is a Los Angeles-based composer, guitarist and songwriter. Prior to scoring film/TV and commercial content, she spent several years working with bands in LA, New York, Portland and San Francisco. She began writing music to picture as a composer at Slow Clap, where she scored Microsoft/Github’s award-winning Building The Future ad campaign. In addition to TRY HARDER!, her previous credits include VISITOR’S DAY, 5 BLOCKS and seasons 1 and 2 of IDA and Gotham Award-nominated series THE F WORD. Currently she records and performs with The Black Heartthrobs, and is set to release Breakers, an instrumental guitar pop album, in 2021.

ADDITIONAL EDITING

victoria chalk

Victoria Chalk is a British-Chinese film editor / fighter / Star Wars nerd. She enjoys storytelling, dim sum, and fast internet. Currently editing PJ Raval's In Plain Sight documentary anthology series. For TRY HARDER! she came in to do some additional editing.

ANIMATOR

leah nichols

Leah Nichols is an award-winning filmmaker and designer based in San Francisco. She served as the motion graphics designer for TRY HARDER! Her previous work includes animation on the documentaries, 73 QUESTIONS (2018 San Francisco Film Festival selection, 2018 SIMA Creative Activism award winner), TOMORROW WILL BE A BETTER DAY FOR ME (2020 BBC News) and ONLY THE MOON (2019 Sundance Ignite short film winner). Her work seeks to expand models of kinship, increase access to collective histories, and champion the compatibility of trauma and joy.

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER & IMPACT PRODUCER

tiffany shan

Tiffany Shan is an Impact Producer on TRY HARDER! and was previously an associate producer, bookkeeper, transcriber, and assistant to Debbie. She previously worked as a political fundraiser and polling data analyst in the Bay Area after graduating from UC Berkeley. Tiffany is an avid traveler and backpacked for two years through Europe, Morocco, Thailand, Korea, Japan, and India. Tiffany is from Los Angeles and hopes to one day be a show runner, and to direct/produce her own movies.

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER & DESIGNER

anna yeo

Anna Yeo is a filmmaker and self-taught graphic designer based in Boston. She recently graduated from Wesleyan University, where she studied Economics and Film and directed community outreach on the board of the Asian American Student Collective. She’s currently enjoying updating this website, managing social media accounts, and designing outreach materials for TRY HARDER!'s impact campaign.

Anna fell in love with filmmaking in high school after making a stop-motion short for the 2015 White House Student Film Festival, where her film was an official selection. She's an aspiring film director and plans to one day make a sensational movie musical.

JUNIOR IMPACT PRODUCER

sherwin yu

Sherwin Yu is a Junior Impact Producer for TRY HARDER! and a recent graduate from Wesleyan University where he studied Film and Television. He has involved himself in the entertainment industry in a variety of capacities, from working production in amateur sets and commercials to doing distribution for independent companies. He particularly enjoys producing work, and helping the creative visions of his colleagues and collaborators come to fruition. He is a proud ex-president of his high school class and relates closely to the many characters of TRY HARDER! Sherwin is currently based in the NY/NJ area and hopes to embark on his own filmmaking project soon.