Renowned filmmaker, film scholar, distinguished professor, and Dean of the Arts Division at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Celine Parreñas Shimizu will premiere her latest film at the 27th San Francisco Independent Film Festival on Friday, February 7, 2025 at the Roxie Theater.
So to Speak is the newest short fiction film written, directed and produced by Shimizu who recently made two feature documentary films including 80 Years Later (2022) and The Celine Archive (2020) which have been awarded at festivals and shown on public television across the country. Along with her filmmaking, Shimizu is a prolific scholar whose book publications include The Movies of Racial Childhoods (2024), The Proximity of Other Skins (2020), Straitjacket Sexualities (2012), and The Hypersexuality of Race (2007), which won Best Book in Cultural Studies from the Association of Asian American Studies in 2009.
Along with a team composed of professionals who are primarily women of color and non-binary filmmakers, Shimizu teamed up with Janet Chen (Ma) to produce the film. Chen (Ma), a film and multimedia director, producer and educator is a recent alumna of the renowned Film and Digital Media M.F.A. Program in Social Documentation. Her latest short, ASIAN BITCHES SPEAK, was honored with a Special Jury award for Documentary Short from the 40th VC Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival 2024, and Best Director for Short Film from the 31st QFilms Long Beach LGBTQ Film Festival 2024.
So to Speak hones in on a Filipina American college student, Morena. Spurred on by an assignment from her professor to create art about sex and power, Morena revisits the past through her heritage, her family, and her own sexual herstory to assess her present realities and create new futures for herself and other Asian American women. By making a “house of sexuality,” she creates the art of sex, and recognizes the traumas and joys of brown girlhood and the power of her voice and her education.
A penetrating look at the experience and questions facing a young woman of color coming of age within the setting of a university, Shimizu’s film strives to represent the struggles many women face on their sexual and educational journeys en route to claiming autonomy and sovereignty. This look at the commingling of ethnicity, gender and sexuality simultaneously captures the importance of sisterhood and the important act of claiming one’s education and voice.
“As a filmmaker and scholar of race, sexuality and representations, particularly of global Asian/American popular culture and the representations of people of color in western cinema, I amplify subjugated perspectives and create new narratives,” says Shimizu. “When I was 20 years old, I wrote an epic poem which won the Eisner, the highest prize in creative art, for poetry, at UC Berkeley. Based on the poem that inventoried my sexual herstory at the time, this film is not autobiographical. It is personal in the sense of my own artfully documented narrative joining my training and expertise as an ethnographer, historian and maker of images for the past 30 plus years.”
So to Speak was filmed entirely on the campus of UC Santa Cruz and most of the cast and crew are UC Santa Cruz undergraduate and graduate students, alumni and professors. The cast and crew also includes students and recent alumni from UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University and Stanford University working with professionals. In multigenerational collaboration.
So to Speak crafts cinema that matters for self-definition in a world where Asian American women are defined by others.
The film features Rowena Chiu in the role of the professor. Chiu, a well-known advocate for gender equality, started speaking out during the #MeToo era as one of the early sexual assault survivors of film producer Harvey Weinstein. Her advocacy work and her personal story, which were featured in the major motion picture She Said (2022), have inspired countless numbers of survivors to speak out against sexual misconduct and harassment within the entertainment industry and beyond.
The film’s world premiere is set for Friday, February 7th at 8:30pm at the Roxie Theater as part of the 27th annual San Francisco Independent Film Festival.
MORE INFORMATION
Tickets:
https://sfindie2025.eventive.org/films
So to Speak trailer:
https://vimeo.com/983453925