People started calling us Piranha Sisters in college. Our last name, Parreñas, turns into something else. Nobody said it to our face. It stuck because it felt true. We were poor and self-supporting and we built careers and voices nobody could stop, and we did it together, like a school of fish nobody wanted to swim near.

A piranha is a joke about what a woman is not supposed to be. Threatening. Man-eating. Emasculating. The word people reach for when a woman is too loud, too hungry, too willing to bite back.

I have been claiming those words since I was nineteen, when I founded a magazine at Berkeley called SMELL THIS, built to say the things about women of color and our bodies and our desires that were not supposed to be said out loud. Piranha Sisters comes from the same place. Refuse the terms of the insult, keep the teeth, lose the shame.

There is plenty of trauma in this film because there was plenty in our lives. It is told by three women who came out the other side still laughing, still hungry for each other’s company, still sisters. The film is about what we did next. Together, unafraid, still swimming.