Celine Parreñas Shimizu

Bio: Celine Parreñas Shimizu is an award-winning filmmaker, as well as an accomplished author and professor. Her work primarily focuses on the intersections of race, gender and sexuality, specifically within the Asian American community. As a Filipinx immigrant, her films also focus on the struggles of Filipinx Americans and the Filipinx immigrant experience. Her films have been internationally-screened and have won various festival awards.

Additionally, Parreñas Shimizu--from 2001 to 2015--was a professor in the Asian American, Film and Media, Comparative Literature, and Feminist Studies departments at UC Santa Barbara. In the past she has also taught at UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Cruz and Stanford University. However, she is currently a professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University.

*In this interview, UC Davis feminist film production student Amihan Ildefonzo Redondiez is in conversation with Celine Parreñas Shimizu who is an old friend of Amihan's mother, Rachel Redondiez. Celine has collaborated with Rachel in the past on her films Her Uprooting Plants Her [1995 ] and Super Flip [1997].

CPS: I am Celine Parreñas Shimizu and I am a filmmaker and a film scholar. And your first question is my family’s immigration story, where my family is from, and when did we come to the US?

AIR: Yes

CPS: So I came to the US in 1983 when I was 13 years old. We ended up living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So I grew up there.

AIR: Oh interesting. And so I noticed that a lot of your films revolve around issues about Filipino immigrants, and I was wondering how your own experiences of immigrating from the Philippines influences the narratives that you are portraying in your films?

CPS: My first film, Mahal Means Love and Expensive [1993], was focused on the lives of Filipino immigrants in the US, and specifically, a Filipino immigrant woman trying to figure out her sexuality within that colonial legacy.

CPS: But what I was gonna say however about the Filipino experience for me--was that when I came to the US, I learned about the “browning” of my skin. You know growing up in the Philippines, the US was a shadow; it was a place that you aspired to go. There’s a certain status of looking towards the US as an ideal place. But when I came here I recognized their gaze upon me. I was a brown person—which meant that I was an unequal person. And I also landed in New England where I learned the word WASP—white Anglo-Saxon Protestant—and I recognized that as the kind of most privileged identity. And it also made me realize that I was far from that.

And this was also very much a class experience for me because these WASP-y people lived in these beautiful victorian houses and I lived in the projects. And I had to work while I was in high school. I had to get up really early and work at Dunkin Donuts, sometimes before I went to school. So not only did I experience “browning”, I experienced real class downfall, and it was very painful. I went as an adult to the projects where I lived, and tears just started falling out of my eyes like I had no control over it. It was a really painful and difficult time to grow up poor and to really not have any money with a ton of people living in your house. We lived in a two bedroom apartment, and I had 6 brothers and sisters and some additional extended family would also come live with us. It was a very very painful--physically, spatially and psychically--difficult time. Because of that I think of it as a time of a lot of loss. My parents had to work two jobs, and so we lost them essentially. We never saw them. And I had to work all the time, like 14 and up working. We didn’t even eat dinner together anymore, so that was very different. So a lot of loss.

And so I wanted to use the medium of film to try to dramatize that experience, to capture the emotions of that time and to even have the memory of the people who lived in that space, lived during that time of suffering, really. To make that time really real, that memory, and I think film was the best way to do that.

AIR: Yeah. Growing up, did you not see this type of representation of struggle and of hardships in mainstream media and in films that you grew up watching?

CPS: Well I grew up in the Philippines for the first 13 years of my life and so there was quite a large number of representations on the screen, right? Like slapstick Filipino family comedy, you know. I grew up watching this one show where there was a poor family that would ask a rich family for money, and there would be money all over the furniture, all over the ground, and so they would just sweep the floor and give the family money. It’s this Filipino sensibility of humor. But the theme song was a Michael Jackson song. It was always Filipino humor, but mixed in with some kind of American pop culture. So it was always a mix. And then, when I came here [to the US], I definitely felt like in order to fit in I had to learn how to catch up to American popular culture. And of course that meant for me at the time watching the Brady Bunch. So -- what a totally blindingly white show right. And so, yes, in terms of popular TV I did not. I couldn't even imagine there would be people who look like me [on TV]... Although it's funny when I first came to the US I was on an airplane with a Filipina movie star who used to be Miss Philippines.

AIR: Oh wow.

CPS: Yeah her name was was Tetchi Agbayani, and she was coming here to become a movie star. So in my first couple of years in the United States I ended up seeing her in a couple of movies. And so I knew Filipinas could be the movies, but her roles were really limited. She barely spoke and she was like a sex bomb and that was it. I saw her in two movies; Rikky and Pete [1988] was one of them.

CPS: But otherwise I did not see Filipinos and our culture...and I mean my friends were very multicultural. But it was also a really intensely racially segregated school that I went to. People were kind of mixed, but it felt there was like a black and white love story going on. As an Asian immigrant, I didn't quite know how I fit in. I felt quite alien.

AIR: That’s really interesting because I guess I feel like for me it's a little backwards. I grew up surrounded by a lot of Filipino immigrants. But since I was born here I didn't really see myself in the media either. And I guess coming to Davis, this is the first time that I've come into a really white space too.

CPS: Wait say that again. So you didn't see representations of yourself in the media, but you were brought up in a Filipino environment?

AIR: Yeah. So I actually went to one of the only Filipino bilingual schools at the time for elementary school. And so a lot of my classmates just immigrated from the Philippines, and so I was able to connect to their struggles in that way. But I was born and raised here in the U.S. And so I didn't get to see any of that...those Filipino shows that you're talking about. So for me I was never able to like see myself represented in the media.

So my mom also showed me your film Her Uprooting Plants Her [1994]--which she was in-- and she mentioned that it was based on of your experiences once immigrating to the US. I was wondering if everything shown in that movie was basically non-fiction? Or were some parts details that you added?

CPS: I think what was nonfiction was the emotion and the sisterhood. That there were going to be sisters, and that there was going to be a large family. That was pretty much the extent of the nonfiction. And also I guess the second part of the nonfiction would be setting it in a work environment. Because I think of immigration and Filipino experiences as really tied to having to do low wage work. So those aspects--the number in the family, the intimacy between sisters, the fighting, and also the work part, that's the nonfiction part. But the idea of the store...

AIR: Yeah the sari-sari store?

CPS: Yeah so I didn't grow up owning or working in a Filipino store, but what I wanted to create was almost like a spatial montage where the Philippines and the United States exist in my mind at the same time. So I wanted to put the stores that I grew up in--you know, the sari-sari stores? -- you know, “variety variety” stores? -- with comic books that you can read and other Filipino food that I can't find in the US.

CPS: I wanted to create a space that included what was in my mind -- which included both the Philippines and the United States. And I wanted to show a story that involved loss in the family. You know, like how you can have a gathering of Filipinos, and you all can be in the same family, but you just have really different ideas of what the family is, or even what home is.

So it was also very inspired by Los Angeles itself. At the time that I was in L.A. when I met your mom in the mid 90s, I was really fascinated by so many stores that have now closed. There was a place called Jeepney Grill. That was a restaurant where they had a real jeepney in the middle of the store. It was like the world of the Philippines inside a building in L.A, you know, where people were going to eat the food of their homeland. I think that's what I wanted to illustrate. How people transform their space to fulfill their needs, whether it's food or a place that looks like their memory of home.

So I wanted to show the immigrant presence in the US through the stores, and how you try to establish home and even just comfort and belonging by having the stuff that you grew up with accessible. Film -- I think it enables you to create a universe that includes different times and different spaces all in one location and in one moment. So that's what I wanted to do in that film.

AIR: Wow, yeah I really love that concept...So I guess this is more of a broader question, but when did you decide to pursue filmmaking?

CPS: When I was a young person I was really both very visual and very literary. When I went to college at UC Berkeley I started out as being an English and Art major. And then I discovered ethnic studies, where it all came together--the English and art part. So I started to read a lot of women of color lit, but also pay attention to art and visual culture.

And then there was a woman named Loni Ding who has now passed away. She was one of the pioneering Asian-American documentary filmmakers. And she trained a lot of us people of color filmmakers who'd then end up going to major film schools. She -- and also my senior thesis advisor Trinh Minh-ha -- made it possible for me to think about a life as a filmmaker. So I think seeing their work really ignited an explosive passion in me to use film as a medium that can reach a lot of people. I also like the collective experience of sitting in the dark and intimately seeping into people's minds. The idea of creating a dream world or an entire world that you made up, or one that shows your perspective. How totally exciting!

I think I love the collaborative part of it, because you can't make a film on your own, or at least it would be less fun. I love working with someone who is so talented in cinematography or someone who is so talented in editing--and I get to choreograph the whole thing. They can help me articulate what I'm trying to say. How awesome is that! Like even meeting your mom; she was a student activist at UCLA. I was just so fascinated by her, like even the way she walks, she’s just such a powerful person.

AIR: Yes, she really is.

CPS: Because I was making a movie, I got to talk to her. I was like “Who are you, what is going on with you?? You’re amazing!” And I just wanted to capture a powerful young woman. And I wanted to put that in something, and I was so happy she agreed to collaborate with me. So it was really like collaboration, and not just “what am I trying to express from my mind?” but to actually work with people on making sense of who we are together in the world.

AIR: And I think she said it was that movie that got her into film too.

CPS: Yeah that's so awesome right? It really brings people together.

CPS: You know it has been a very challenging project in that it’s a true story that has circulated in our community for almost 90 years. And there have been historical records as well as archival documents about this event. Dawn Mabalon also writes about it in her book, and other historians from the community are also aware of it. And it’s a story that has haunted many people including hundreds of students who discovered the story when they were undergraduates at SF State in 1994 through 1996, and they were very instrumental in making sure that the story got out. And so I'm investigating that story and I'm really centering the family because I don’t want it to be told just as a ghost story which I think is very disrespectful to her as a real person and the sacrifices that she made. She has a family that continues to live through the intergenerational trauma of her death, she was essentially sacrificed by the community you know.

So we just finished all the principal photography, and we are now editing and the film will be finished in May 2019. That’s our goal at least.

AIR: Wow yeah I’ve actually never even heard of that story before, so yes it's really important to bring awareness to it…And then do you have any future projects in mind?

CPS: Yeah so after this is done in May I’m thinking that I’ll start pre-production on a movie that I'm currently calling Araw ng Patay which means “day of the dead” or “day of the death”, it could also mean “day for the dead” and “day for the death”. And it’s a movie about my own experience as well as other mothers experiences with the loss of a child because my youngest suddenly died four years ago.

AIR: Oh I’m so sorry to hear that.

CPS: You know his death really informs the way I live. I'm really committed to my family, and I also have a more compassionate understanding of how death affects the living. And I think that the pain of losing a child is so acute and so severe -- like it doesn't cease. It stays with me all the time. And yet at the same time I live a life that is very fruitful, that is very loving.

And I'm thinking that I'm going to make a film that either interviews or tries to capture you know the coexistence of death and life and how to cultivate a life thriving that’s in the aftermath of a death that's very painful. So that's the very baby seed of the next project. And you know it's it's really focused on--I mean there's so much death in communities of color. So not only the deaths of you know Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice...but the death of black boys and children who were mistaken for being violent, or being adults.

But for me it was nothing like that really...it was a common virus that attacked his heart. You know, my family comes from different circumstances. So at the same time it’s about the lack of control we have over life. Even in the face of whatever power you think you have. And so, I want to make a film about that. And so it’s just very very beginning. But I'm hoping to include my students who are also suffering through loss to help make a work that will confront that loss and make something that's meaningful for all of us.

AIR: Yeah. Okay. Thank you, thank you so much for sharing that.

CPS: You’re welcome, good luck with this project Amihan.

Interviewer Bio: Amihan Ildefonzo Redondiez is a second generation Filipina born and raised in San Francisco. Additionally, Amihan is currently a third year Gender, Women’s and Sexualities Studies and Anthropology double major at UC Davis. She is a musician, poet and aspiring filmmaker who aims to to use the concepts and skills learned from her education to influence the ways in which she crafts her art.

*This interview was conducted through Google Hangout chat from San Francisco to Davis in November 2018*