Isabel Sandoval, Filmmaker - Turtle Bay, Manhattan. Portrait by Waltpaper.
INTERVIEW AND PORTRAITS BY WALTPAPER
24 FPS: Isabel Sandoval, Incandescent Auteur
Catching up with the celebrated filmmaker/actress on the cusp of her forthcoming feature film, Moonglow
I’ve often contemplated New York City as a womb of sorts: time spent isolated, yet never alone, in wordless dialogue, submerged and canvassing her membranous terrain. She whispers, at times pulses, with a lifetime of gazes, between parameters of brutality and caress. She nurses a loyal and comforting glow, warmed by filament streets, threading her bulbous isle, pumping currency of hope, fantasy, and desperation. Her incandescence is like no other. And while many artists have cast fine nets to wrangle the fireflies of her motherly essence, I’d place Isabel Sandoval’s capture, in her widely celebrated feature, Lingua Franca, fluttering, in rather prestigious company, quite near the top.
Isabel Sandoval is a Filipino independent filmmaker and actress currently based in the United States. Lingua Franca premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, establishing Sandoval as the first out trans woman of color to compete in the festival, and was released by ARRAY. The film landed Best Narrative Feature at Bentonville Film Festival, and Sandoval was awarded Best Actress at the 18th International Cinephile Society (ICS) Awards and the Pacific Meridian International Film Festival. In addition to her catalog of features being streamed on Netflix, MUBI, and Criterion Channel, her short film Shangri-La (2021) was commissioned for MIU MIU’s series Women’s Tales. She has directed for the FX drama series Under The Banner of Heaven.
During a recent visit to New York, while working on her forthcoming film, Moonglow, Isabel and I got a chance to spend the afternoon together, wandering around Greta Garbo’s old hood, Turtle Bay.
Isabel Sandoval, Filmmaker - Turtle Bay, Manhattan. Portrait by Waltpaper.
Waltpaper: You grew up in Cebu and shot your first two films, Señorita and Apparition, in the Philippines, but you studied business at NYU. Were you considering filmmaking while at NYU? What was the spark that gave you the courage to make your first film?
Isabel Sandoval: My whole pretext behind going to NYC for grad school was really to go where the American arthouse film scene was, to luxuriate in it. (And literally—in the mid-2000s, the NYU campus in the village was flanked by arthouse cinemas like Film Forum, IFC, Angelika, and the now-defunct Landmark Sunshine.) I’ve been enamored with the movies since I was a kid and thought of myself as a cinephile since high school. I had an undergrad degree in Psychology but went for business instead of film at NYU because, as much as I wanted to make movies, I didn’t exactly romanticize the idea of a professional career as an arthouse-leaning filmmaker in America, especially the economics of it. The plan was always to hold down some kind of day job in, say, marketing while making movies on the side. Shortly after I finished business school, I paired up with my cinematographer roommate and shot a short version of what would become my debut feature, Señorita. I had a clear idea of the film’s imagery and dramaturgy, and he brought in the technical skill and craft to materialize that.
W: You’ve been open about your film work tracing your gender transition, and have mentioned that by the end of making Apparition in 2012, you were clear about your journey. You didn’t make the widely celebrated film, Lingua Franca, until seven years later. Did you step away from filmmaking to focus on transitioning, or did they remain interwoven?
IS: They were interwoven throughout. I’ll be frank, I wouldn’t be the filmmaker I am now if I hadn’t transitioned. You can say I chronicled the emotional and psychological changes I was going through during my transition—for instance, suddenly dealing with male attention when I started presenting female—while writing Lingua Franca and fictionalizing the narrative at the same time. Throughout that process I felt myself becoming more confident and comfortable in my own skin as an artist, trusting my own intuition from scene to scene in shooting Lingua Franca.
Isabel Sandoval, Filmmaker - Greenacre Park, Manhattan. Portrait by Waltpaper.
W: Your films lean into stories of disempowered women making important decisions in fraught socio-political settings. In Lingua Franca, the main character Olivia, played by you, is an undocumented Filipina trans woman seeking a marriage-based green card. She falls in love against the intense backdrop of the Trump-era ICE raids. What sparked the film’s creation, and did your personal journey inform the storyline?
IS: On the surface, Lingua Franca has autobiographical narrative elements—both Olivia and I are Filipino trans immigrants living in Brooklyn at the time—but the similarities stop there. While it’s psychologically grounded—I was clearly channeling my own emotions—the immigration aspect was fiction (anchored in research and interviews with a few people I knew.) I don’t buy into the idea of mining my own life for art or drama, or at least not overtly, sans any kind of transmutation. I’m a private person, and as a Pisces I relish my secrets, so I would find that self-exposure boring and solipsistic. That being said, I consider Lingua Franca my most creatively naked and candid effort as a filmmaker. Earlier on, I had insecurities about being a legitimate filmmaker, having skipped film school, and I would hide behind self-conscious nods and homages to the masters who influenced me. That wasn’t the case while making Lingua Franca. I would like to think it was all me. Yes, my aesthetic is the sum total of my own predilections and my influences, but it wasn’t an intentional choice on my part to ape them. I just decided to be in the moment and go with my gut while shooting that movie.
Isabel Sandoval, Filmmaker - Greenacre Park, Manhattan. Portrait by Waltpaper
W: Your short film, Shangri-La (2021), was created in conjunction with MIU MIU’s short film anthology, Woman’s Tales, and deals with racial prejudice and forbidden love. How did that collaboration come about? What was the inspiration, and did your perspective on fashion and costuming for film shift or evolve through that project?
IS: The Giornate Degli Autori sidebar at the Venice Film Festival, where Lingua Franca premiered and which programs Women’s Tales, suggested me to MIU MIU for the series. I used to feel uneasy about fashion and haute couture. I honestly thought it too vacuous and frivolous for any self-respecting artist to take on. But fashion is essentially clothes imbued with meaning and feeling, and that’s how it is with cinema. It’s about imbuing—or perhaps distilling—emotion in an image or sound. I approached the different looks in my MIU MIU short as conduits, costumes that enabled my farm laborer protagonist to slip into alternate realities, more emancipated and extraordinary versions of herself. Shangri-La is essentially this woman’s soliloquy about her dreams and desires that traverses the worlds of fantasy and reality, and how holding on to that ability to desire, to envision a better reality for ourselves is a vital step to making that happen.
Isabel Sandoval, Filmmaker - Greenacre Park, Manhattan. Portrait by Waltpaper.
W: You’ve directed an episode of the FX drama, Under the Banner of Heaven. How was it going from writing, directing, and starring in your own films to contributing, as one of multiple directors, to a broader television series?
IS: It felt freeing actually, like a breath of fresh air. It’s definitely a welcome break compared to how all-consuming and thus exhausting working on my own films tends to be for me (as enchanted as I am with every minute of it). In my own work I wear multiple creative hats. It’s tougher for me in the development and writing phase—I personally find writing to be the most laborious aspect. I balk at writing dialogue because my kind of character is not the most vocal and transparent. I’m into revealing who they are by what they don’t actually say, what they withhold. So you can imagine my excitement at being given a script—and not just any script, but one with such ambition and complexity—and working with cast members like Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones. As an episodic director, you’re working with a visual, dramatic, rhythmic template, and I try to strike a balance between having my episode feel like part of the whole show and finding moments to infuse my own sensibility as well.
W: The experiences of migration and shifting politics thread through your films. Do you anticipate this continuing within your work? Are you conscious of a body of work being built, or do you prefer to take it film by film, letting themes reveal themselves after the work is created?
lS: It’s never something conscious or deliberate on my part—the themes or narratives in my films—but a pattern I’ve observed in retrospect four features in (including Moonglow). I find myself gravitating towards bifurcated characters, split between a public self and a secret life, who navigate two distinct worlds, whether it’s political, geographical, or temporal. I made Lingua Franca when I did and explored those themes because that felt right to me at the time. There’s an expectation that if you’re an artist from a minority background, you have to be an activist. But that’s not how I approach my art. When asked about the message of her film at a Q&A once, Claire Denis answered, “I’m an artist, not a social worker.” I don’t set out to evangelize to audiences with a set agenda. Subconsciously my politics will reveal itself in the aesthetic choices I make in the film anyway. I’d like to make films that are ambivalent, complicated, and slippery. I want to surprise the audience, but most of all, I want to surprise myself.
W: Your first two films were shot in the Philippines. Lingua Franca was shot in 16 days in New York. Having returned to the Philippines to shoot your forthcoming feature, Moonglow, in Manila, was there a full circle moment? Any pros or cons in relation to shooting there vs. in the US?
IS: As someone returning to my home country having achieved a certain stature as an independent filmmaker in the US, I’d say it was definitely easier to go about making a film and achieving the vision I have for it intact. A smaller budget (dollar-wise) goes a long way back home, and we’re not stuck forever in development and casting. In fact, I went from doing the first draft of the script to wrapping principal photography in 11 months. I want to be able to make passion projects in Europe and the Philippines, and take on commercial and director-for-hire projects in Hollywood (but those that genuinely pique my interest, not soulless cash grabs, if I can help it). I’m tickled by the idea of approaching studio projects with more subversion, whether to the form or the politics. For instance, making a film that explores imperialism like Tropical Gothic in Hollywood of all places. That would be a real coup.
I just finished Moonglow. We shot it in April and May 2024, and I did the sound design in December in Taipei with Tu Duu-chih, who worked with Wong Kar-wai and Edward Yang. It’s an exercise in style in that it’s my take on classic Hollywood noir and 1950s melodrama set in 1970s Manila. It’s also my lush, sensuous vision of (an otherwise predominantly social-realist) arthouse Philippine cinema.
Isabel Sandoval, Filmmaker - Greenacre Park, Manhattan. Portrait by Waltpaper