THE TEAM

YURIKO GAMO ROMER is an award-winning director who holds a Master’s degree from Stanford University, is a Student Academy Award winner, National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Scholar, and American Association of Japanese University Women Scholar. Her previous film Mrs. Judo, about Keiko Fukuda (1913-2013), the first woman to attain the 10th degree black belt in judo, traveled to more than 25 film festivals and was awarded the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary at the 2013 International Festival of Sport Films in Moscow and broadcast on PBS nationally.
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MARC SMOLOWITZ is a multi-award winning independent filmmaker whose works have to touched 200+ film festivals and markets on 5 continents, yielding substantial worldwide sales to theatrical, television and VOD outlets, notable box office receipts, and numerous awards and nominations. His long list of credits includes films that have screened at top tier festivals such as Sundance, Berlinale, Venice, Chicago, Palm Springs, AFI DOCS, IDFA, DOC NYC, CPH: DOX, Tokyo, Melbourne, Viennale, Krakow, Jerusalem, among others.
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LOI AMEERA ALMERON is a versatile documentary producer and post supervisor who is celebrated for her acclaimed documentaries such as, "Fractured,” "Baseball Behind Barbed Wire,” and "For Our Children.” For two consecutive years, she helped produce “Stephen Curry: Underrated” and “And So It Begins” that both world premiered at Sundance Film Festival. She is the 2024 Elevate Award recipient from the Berkeley Film Foundation and Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. Her documentaries have earned awards and nominations from prestigious institutions including the Academy Awards, NAACP Image Awards, FOCAL International Awards, BAFTA, and various international film festivals. Her films are available on PBS Frontline, Netflix, AppleTV, Prime Video, HBO, The Criterion Channel, iTunes, National Endowment for the Arts, and Good Docs.
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STEVEN OKAZAKI is an Academy Award®-winning filmmaker whose documentaries explore the human consequences of dramatic historical events and social inequities.  In addition to winning an Oscar® for Days of Waiting (1990), he  received three other Oscar® nominations, a Primetime Emmy, a Peabody, Camerimage's "Outstanding Achievement Award," and the Grand Prize at the Banff World Media Festival.  Other films for HBO and PBS include: Unfinished Business (1985), Black Tar Heroin (1999), White Light/Black Rain (2007), The Conscience of Nhem En (2008) and Heroin: Cape Cod (2015).  He also directed the comedy Living on Tokyo Time (1986) and Mifune: The Last Samurai (2016), a tribute to his childhood hero.  His favorite baseball players are Sandy Koufax and Rickey Henderson.  https://www.farallonfilms.com/

KEN SCHNEIDER has edited over thirty feature-length documentaries about war and peace, human rights, art, American history and contemporary social issues and has been honored with Emmys, Peabodys, International Documentary Association awards, and an Oscar nomination for Regret To Inform.
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ANDREW BLACK’S work has been for theatrical and broadcast distribution and has shown in many festivals worldwide. His selected films include: Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 and Sicko, Sam Green’s The Weather Underground, Jake Kornbluth’s Inequality For All and Toby McLeod’s series, Standing on Sacred Ground.
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