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 2025 Sundance Documentary Producers Lab fellow, an Elevate Award winner from the Berkeley Film Foundation and Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, a Saul Zaentz Emerging Filmmaker Fellow with BAVC Media, and a FOCAL International nominee. With her roots in Philippine documentary filmmaking, her work focuses on investigative, historical, and personal documentaries on civil and disability rights, immigration and race, and science and society. She has produced and post-produced award-winning films for PBS, AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video, Good Docs, and various international film festivals, including two consecutive world premieres at Sundance. Loi has also edited a Student Academy Award winner and an NAACP Image Award nominee.
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GLEN S. FUKUSHIMA is a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, where he focuses on the nexus between technology, national security, trade, and U.S.–Asia relations. In Washington, D.C., he is Vice Chair of SIPC (Securities Investor Protection Corporation) and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. He previously served as Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Japan and China at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and held senior executive roles at one European and four American multinational corporations. Mr. Fukushima was elected twice as President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan and currently divides his time between Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C., and Tokyo.

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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