Arts & Culture
‘So to Speak’ earns award at IndieX Film Festival
Written, directed and produced by Shimizu, So to Speak features a Filipina American college student, Morena, as she faces questions of sexuality and identity.
Dean of the Arts and Distinguished Professor, Film and Digital Media, Celine ParreñasShimizu’s short fiction film, So to Speak, recently won the Best LGBTQ Short Film at the IndieX Film Festival in Los Angeles. Shimizu accepted the award to a very enthusiastic crowd of over 300 at the ceremony and noted that it was a very exciting surprise for her. The IndieX Film Festival includes a wide range of films from around the world, including powerful, emotionally resonant storytelling across genres, from gripping thrillers and heartfelt dramas to vibrant animation and bold comedies.
Written, directed and produced by Shimizu, So to Speak features a Filipina American college student, Morena, as she faces questions of sexuality and identity. Spurred on by an assignment from her professor to create art about sex and power, Morena revisits the past through her heritage, relationships to the women in her family, and her own sexual herstory to assess her present realities and create new futures for herself and other Asian American women.
With a cast primarily composed of women and non-binary individuals, So to Speak was filmed entirely on the campus of UC Santa Cruz and many of the cast and crew are UC Santa Cruz undergraduate and graduate students, alumni and professors along with students from UC Berkeley, San Francisco State, and Stanford University.
“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 experience joining my training and expertise as an ethnographer, historian and maker of images for the past 30 plus years.”