Mike Shum ’07 was working as a CC Admissions counselor in 2009, saving up money to buy a camera, when he connected with CC alum and producer Neal Baer ’78. Seeing Shum’s interest in film, Baer invited him along as a director’s apprentice for an episode of Law & Order: SVU.
On set, Shum found encouragement from an unlikely source – actor and rapper Ice T – to follow his passion for documentary filmmaking. That was the inciting incident for Shum to quit his Admissions job, sell most of his possessions, and head to East Africa.
Shum first discovered film as a way to combine his interests in sociology, art, and global topics as a student at CC. When he arrived on campus as an El Pomar Scholar in 2003, he found it very different from his multicultural context in Denver.
“The lack of diversity was uncomfortable and unnerving, but sociology courses helped me understand and process that.”
Study abroad experiences and encouragement from professors Sandy Wong and Adrienne Seward cemented in Shum a desire to tell stories as a way to explore big ideas through people’s perspectives. During his first few years as an independent filmmaker, he traveled through Rwanda, Kenya, Congo, and Libya during the Arab Spring. He honed his craft, growing an audience through YouTube, and worked as a “backpack video journalist” for nonprofits and media outlets with only what he could carry.
“Film has this unique ability to move past the headline and move past the shock value of an image,” he shares. “I like nuance. I like making it more difficult to put someone into a box and trying to understand where they’re coming from.”
“The reality of how much we don’t know about this world and how much we can and should know continues to drive me.”
Mike Shum ’07
In 2020, Shum found himself in another pivotal moment. He had just moved to Saint Paul, MN when the local murder of George Floyd caused a national firestorm.
“My natural inclination was to get out into the streets and start filming because you could just feel the tension rising exponentially the day after he was killed. I just kept filming every day that entire week, and the whole world changed overnight.”
Police on Trial, Shum’s resulting documentary with PBS’s Frontline, earned the Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. Another notable project is American Voices: A Nation in Turmoil, a collaboration with emergency physician Blair Woodbury ’06, that explores the perspectives of 12 Americans through the 2020 pandemic and racial reckoning. In October 2024, Frontline released a follow-up featuring the same subjects through the 2024 election cycle.
Shum is now a 2024-25 Nieman Fellow for Journalism at Harvard University where he’s researching press freedoms in Hong Kong and Macao. This topic is personal as his grandfather, whom he never met, was a journalist in Macao in the 1950s. Shum believes we have a lot to learn about how press censorship affects our understanding of what’s happening in places like Russia, Syria, and Gaza.
“The reality of how much we don’t know about this world and how much we can and should know continues to drive me.”
It was recently announced that Shum will be CC’s 2025 Commencement Speaker.