The sumptuous visuals in Filipina actor-director Isabel Sandoval’s films play with darkness and light: the black and white habits of the nuns in Aparisyon, set in a monastery during Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship; the shadowy home in Lingua Franca, where an undocumented caregiver, Olivia, looks after an old woman and falls for her son, who discovers that Olivia is trans. In a short film for a fashion brand, Sandoval shows two lovers — white and Filipina in the 1930s — communicating their forbidden feelings through confessionals (she was raised Catholic, after all), bathed in shadows, glowing with desire. She answered our ten questions here, clear as day.
Lux Magazine