FEM EX FILM ARCHIVE (UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ) -- 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).
“The Celine Archive is a documentary about a woman who was buried alive by her community in Northern California in 1932. She was a Filipina woman who was murdered by the Filipino American community at the time,” Shimizu says. “ ... 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.”