Brown Club of Greater San Francisco presents award-winning, Sundance documentary: Try Harder!

AGENDA
- Livestream Film Screening 6 - 7:30pm
- Live Q&A with Director and Brown alum Debbie Lum, Brown Club member and psychiatrist filmmaker Ravi Chandra, film subject and Brown alum Rachael Schmidt, and Challenge Success co-founder Denise Pope 7:30-8:30pm
* Entire program available for viewing 5 days following event, thru September 6 (Please note, webinar requires 3-4 hours to process and will be made available by the morning of September 2)

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About The Film
Fresh off its premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, try harder! is the first feature-documentary about Lowell High School. Following rave reviews, it will air on PBS' Independent Lens in spring 2022, and is only available now at selective film festivals. Filmmaker Debbie Lum and her Impact team are partnering with the Brown Club of Greater San Francisco for this private screening + Q&A. In the words of Brian Hu, director of San Diego Asian Film Festival, where try harder! won the Audience Award:

“Kids at Lowell are pretty amazing,” says one Lowell student, nervously. “Amazing” is what sets them apart: these are specially-selected students in San Francisco’s top high school, a fabled institution that produces college-ready superstars. But “amazing” is also a high bar to live up to: against their peers in silent competition, to their parents’ explicit and implicit expectations of immigrant success, but importantly, to their own inchoate standards of personal value. Furthermore, most of the students at Lowell are Asian American, which comes with a different set of biases about being merely “A.P. machines,” especially in the eyes of Ivy Leagues trying to maintain their white country club reputations, as one Lowell teacher bluntly warns.

The five students we get to know in Debbie Lum’s peppy, nerve-racking, and joyous try harder! are anything but machines. They are not-so-secret dancers and ice cream scoopers. They exude genuine love for each other, their parents, and their teachers. Set across their senior year, Lum follows them from an autumn scrambling to submit college applications, to a bittersweet graduation anticipating the next chapter of trying harder and being amazing.