DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT.

The truth about abusive men should be told by the people they harmed.

When our father died, his community was ready to narrate him into history as a good man. Kind, generous, respected, a philanthropist. We had been estranged from him for more than two decades. We paid his medical bills. We paid for his funeral.

Filipina immigrant sisters, trained as feminist scholars, working inside some of the most powerful universities in the world. The three of us use that authority to refuse the lies that keep women quiet.

We turn our ethnographic training on our own lives. Our education emancipated us, financially and psychically, and we show it and share it without apology.

The film is saturated in color and moves between the Philippine provinces and the universities where we now work.

Emancipation. We freed ourselves from our parents as teenagers in order to survive. PIRANHA SISTERS documents the disruption of a legacy of violence.

We took a risk speaking this way. What we got back was each other.

— Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Director