The film follows three Filipina American immigrant sisters with PhDs, all professors. I am a dean and distinguished professor at UCLA. Rhacel holds an endowed chair at Princeton. Juno is a professor at Cornell. You see those positions in how we walk, speak, and dress.

AAPI women are among the least represented groups in higher education leadership, measured against how many of us hold the degrees. Our numbers thin at every rung above tenure, and they thin faster than they do for AAPI men. Bias, missing mentorship, and stereotype do the work.

Each of us studies our own histories. Rhacel is the leading sociologist of Filipina labor and migration. Juno’s work on human-animal relations changed how science and technology studies accounts for violence and recognition. Mine reads power at the site of intimacy in the moving image.

What we learned in school is what we used to survive. Analysis, articulation, history, ethnography. Skills that make a person audible, visible, legible, and recognizable to herself.

The film is Filipina American feminism incarnate. It is the case for why the professoriate, the deanships, and the presidencies need us in them.

Speaking truth to power in a church, a university, or a family takes courage, and it changes the institution along with the speaker.

— Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Writer, Director and Producer