Try Harder!

“This whole process creates people who are very cynical about the colleges they end up going to,” says one impending graduate in Debbie Lum’s probing, empathetic and good-humored look at the hypercompetitive college application process at the No. 1 ranked public high school in San Francisco.  Lum’s camera primarily shadows five students at the majority Asian American school — three of whom are Asian, one biracial and one white — as they navigate the sleep-deprived onslaught of cramming for exams and writing college essays while dealing with parental pressures and their own insecurities. One student, who is white, says that even with a 4.0 GPA and a near-perfect SAT score he’d have only a 1 in 5 chance of getting into Stanford. The doc also examines the roles ethnicity and racial profiling play in the college vetting process at Ivy League schools and elite West Coast universities like Stanford, which allegedly limit the number of Asian Americans they accept. Try Harder! is a film that makes us genuinely care about the success of its young subjects even as we recognize the absurdity and arbitrariness of a flawed process.  ~Luke Baynes