Impulse Magazine

ISABEL SANDOVAL - Interview & Portraits by Waltpaper for IMPULSE magazine. / March 5, 2025 by Walt Cassidy

Isabel Sandoval, Filmmaker - Turtle Bay, Manhattan. Portrait by Waltpaper.

Created for and first published by IMPULSE magazine. Click HERE to view original.

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.

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.

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.

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.

GIO BLACK PETER / December 23, 2024 by Walt Cassidy

Gio Black Peter in his Chinatown studio. Portrait by Waltpaper

Originally published by IMPULSE Magazine - October 8, 2024

New Yorkers are known to wall themselves away from any sign of vulnerability—it's that shellacked exterior that helps us survive an often brutal city littered with chaos. Queer folk tend to spray on a few extra layers for more protection, as we carry our own internalized gridlock of obsessively ordered rules and standards; however, queer artists seem consistently drawn to the freedom that nature offers through a broad range of pictorial depiction. We like to cut our own path through the leaves of grass. It's an undeniably charming and hazy course, but are we naturing or nurturing?

Gio Black Peter is a Guatemalan-American visual artist, actor, and musical performer. He has released two LPs, It’s fucked up (2008) and The Virgin Shuffle (2011) and appeared in the films Eban and Charley (2000), directed by James Bolton, and Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2010), directed by Bruce LaBruce. His paintings, drawings, and installations have been exhibited internationally and featured in the books Art & Queer Culture by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer and Everyday Joys in Twenty-First Century Queer American Painting by David Deutsch.

His work is magnetic and conveys a subversive energy radiating from a core of puckish vulnerability. His figures entangle, seduce, resist, and indulge in a sort of mystical, primordial hustle. They’re okay with you sweating through their carnal hypnotic fantasy while quietly offering something much more profound, committed, and dare I say monogamous—not at all to the flesh, but to ritual and all things that rise higher and higher.

Devotion is ever-present. Shadows and darkness linger behind intoxicated stares. Confidently etched flights of flesh and flora sing nuanced songs of magic, loss, and isolation in hope and search of companionship, salvation, or at least a good time. His heart blossoms through an immaculate assembly of color—unguarded, soft, yearning—but there’s always caution. The lines are heavy and without hardened pretension; nothing is transactional or contrived. His work maps the most tender of souls as he dives before the sun: a rooftop Icarus dreaming of love amidst shards of broken concrete. This is the work of Gio Black Peter.

Waltpaper: It was great to come by and witness your live/work space. Chinatown and the Lower East Side have historically been bastions of immigrant culture and trade. Does the area influence your work in any way?

Gio Black Peter: It was fun having you over. I’m glad we didn't lock ourselves out on the roof. I’ve been in this space for three years now. It’s my second experience with a working/living space. The first art studio I lived in was great, except for the fact that there was no shower, only a sink. I rigged a garden hose that went from the sink, out the window, and onto the roof. It was great during spring and summer—lots of naked outdoor parties, but once it got cold, the party was over. My working hours are erratic. I’m either up all night painting until the morning, or I work in small sessions throughout the day, so living in the same place I work in makes the most sense. Chinatown is quiet at night, which is perfect for painting. I also have the utmost respect for my Chinatown neighbors. Once there was an entire marching band outside my window. It was the most beautiful sight. My street was filled with what seemed like the entire neighborhood chanting and banging on drums and pots. Turns out they were protesting the new mega-jail the city is building. It will be the tallest jail in the world. What a waste of money and resources. Of course I went out and joined them.

W: Your family immigrated from Guatemala when you were quite young. Someone mentioned seeing the element of dance in your linework and brushwork and a connection to Maya culture, despite being quite far removed as a result of the early disconnect. Does that run throughout your practice, or was it specific to one work?

GBP:I do believe it runs through—not just my artwork, but in everything I do. The painting you're referring to is a mural-sized portrait of Marsha P. Johnson. I was standing in front of it, retracing the linework as if I were painting it. My friend saw me making these swooping gestural movements with my arms when he stated—and I agree with him 100%—that I was doing a dance in front of the canvas. My work is expressive, so movement plays a big part. How you dance, walk, move, and express yourself is in your genetic makeup. Your ancestors are literally there with you, in your cells. It’s not just what I believe; it's backed up by science. In fact, it’s hypothesized that cells carry memory. That’s why some organ transplant recipients may exhibit preferences, emotions, and memories resembling those of the donors, suggesting a form of memory storage within the transplanted organ. Also, it is believed that “fear can be inherited through generations.” If fear can, then why not also joy? I believe when I was dancing in front of this giant painting, the movement, aka my expression, was being informed by my cells, which were informed by many past generations of my ancestors, which as a Guatemalan, means the Maya.

Gio Black Peter on the rooftop of his Chinatown studio. Portrait by Waltpaper

W: The notion of queer ritual seems to enter your work frequently. Historically, queer ritual has been coded and hidden, sometimes even within our own consciousness. I think the power of art is in restraint: It’s what you don’t reveal that gives it power. Your work has a distinctively queer current of playful sexual activity, with masks and glory holes, yet you elegantly avoid the trap of revealing too much, even with the most blatant of subject matter.

GBP: As a queer person, the work I make comes from a specific vibration which is informed by my experiences navigating through life. There is no such thing as “straight art,” so there is no such thing as “gay art.” Art is just art. That said, if I make a piece that explores a love story between two males, it would look different than that of a heterosexual connection. It’s important to make work that stays authentic to one’s self. If you make truthful work, there is no need to worry about pitfalls. The images I use to tell a story come from a personal place. Rituals and sacrifice also play a big part of my creative process. I believe in sex magic and sexual transmutation—that’s when you use your sexual energy as fuel for something else. For me, it’s art, and I’m never low on fuel. Both worlds are intertwined. It’s why Picasso said, “Sex and art are the same thing.” As far as masks, I agree with the GOAT Oscar Wilde when he said, “Give a man a mask and he will show his true face.”

W: The portrait you did upon turning 40 is rich in personal mythology. Your explanation of the composition evoked the symbolic structuring of tarot cards. What’s your relationship to mysticism, divination, and allegory?

GBP: I have a friend who believes that all art already exists in some other cosmic plane—it’s the artist’s job to pull it out of that plane and bring it into existence. I’ve always liked this allegory. The art-making process is a form of mysticism. Through my imagination and sensibilities, I can connect with something immaterial. I’ve always been hypersensitive—it’s a terrible way to exist day-to-day, but it’s great for making art. It’s funny how things turned out, because, as a kid, I hated being so sensitive, but now it’s my super power.

W: In addition to the quality of your linework, another element that comes forward is that you’re a fantastic colorist. Gauguin emerges in my mind as a comparison.

GBP: Thank you. I think of color as a primordial language. When it comes to color, I go with my gut. Even as a kid, I had a strong sense of what worked, intuitively. It might be one of those things inherited cellularly. I remember making a drawing in the first grade that my teacher singled out and made a big fuss about. She had it framed and put in the hallway for the whole school to see. My cousins attended the same school 12 years later, and my drawing was still on display. It consisted of four to five figures standing next to each other, each character a different color. From what I remember, one of the figures had his head bowed down, and his hands were up—not unlike something I would draw now. By the way, Gauguin was also self-taught. Maybe we speak the same color language because we’re tapping into the same frequency. Or maybe it’s because though he was born in France, he spent his childhood in Peru. Peruvian textiles are similar to those in Guatemala, and perhaps that’s where he connected with color.

W: Looking ahead, what objectives or projects will you be pursuing?

GBP: At the moment, I’m working on a book to be released in spring 2025. In the meantime, you can find me with the Chinatown marching band, and the rest of the time dancing in front of a canvas.