SO TO SPEAK

Director Statement

I am 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.

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 in 1991. The poem inventoried my sexual herstory at the time as one shaped by my family, my immigration, and my new relationships with friends and intimates. 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 years. The film is thus a multigenerational collaboration between myself then and now and between 30 students and 15 professional filmmakers, the majority of whom are AAPI women.

As a scholar and filmmaker of sexualities, I understand that each of our sexualities is a terrain of inheritance and cultivation both. Our cultural, historical, and relational contexts shape our desires. None of our desires are removed from these contexts even as we work to undo and transform them. What is deemed personal and individual can be intensely public and social and our attachment to our subjugation can feel confounding as we craft new selves. The work of sexuality is choosing what to keep and what to let go, what to pursue and grow and what to dismiss and relinquish in the project of creating a more just world of better representations, relations and realities.