Words by Tricia Romano
The Queen of Sensual Cinema™ sits on what appears to be a throne. A large circular rattan weave envelops Isabel Sandoval, the director, writer, producer—auteur, thank you—who is on my computer screen, fresh-faced, sporting a bob haircut, beamed in from Calgary, and telling me what it’s like to be directing famous actors for her first crack at directing a major TV episode of the Hulu limited series, Under the Banner of Heaven which premieres April 28.
“Part of me was quite daunted at first at the thought of directing these Hollywood stars,” she says, of Andrew Garfield, Sam Worthington, and Daisy Edgar-Jones. “After the first scene, it’s not such a big deal anymore. Andrew and Sam like working with me, and we hit it off creatively. Andrew, apparently, the evening after our first shoot day together, texted the showrunner saying that he thought my direction was smart and precise.”
Or, as she described the experience more succinctly on Twitter:
“My movies can be so dark and miserable that I let loose,” she laughs, talking about the carefree way she interacts on her frequently light-hearted, sharp-tongued Twitter account. The Queen of Sensual Cinema™ moniker is one she half-jokingly gave to herself; the “auteur” on her bio might have been made in jest, but the artistic vision of her films is real.
Sandoval wrapped up filming in Calgary last fall. The series, based on Jon Krakauer’s book about an infamous Mormon fundamentalist double homicide, was adapted for TV by Academy Award-winner Dustin Lance Black. This marks the first time Sandoval’s had access to the luxuries of a big studio budget. Her three indie films, Señorita, Apparition, and the acclaimed Lingua Franca, were all shot for less than $500,000 in fewer than 16 days. By contrast, she’s now working with a massive set, bigger budget, and far larger crew than any of her other projects. And of course there are the superstars. It’s been an adjustment, but one that she’s adapted to quickly.
Though she doesn’t have the same autonomy here as when she’s made her own films, Sandoval was not asked to take the edge off of her distinctive noir-ish style; in fact, Black and Anna Culp, executive vice president of Imagine TV, which is producing the show, chose her for the episode based on her work. “My episode happens to be the most quiet and introspective one,” she says.
From Lingua Franca
I first met Sandoval in November 2019 when we were both at MacDowell, an artist residency in New Hampshire. I had already been there a few weeks, and it was Thanksgiving night. The cluster of artists, writers, and poets who were assembled were wine-drunk and turkey-full, already bonded and playing games and dancing in the main hall when she arrived. Tall and graceful, she has an easy-going charisma and melded quickly with the group. At that time, her third feature film, which she stars in, Lingua Franca, had just debuted at the Venice Film Festival, and was not yet widely released.
Nearly two years later, amidst a pandemic, Sandoval’s career has exploded with astonishing speed. Ava Duvernay’s company picked up Lingua Franca, and released it on Netflix in August 2020. The film garnered an Indie Spirit nomination for the John Cassavetes Award (for films made for less than $500,000). Sandoval’s next feature, Tropical Gothic, still in pre-production, was awarded 10,000 Euros at the Berlin International Film Festival. And in 2021, fashion brand Miu Miu, tapped her to shoot a short film, called Shangri-La, as part of its “Women’s Tales” series.
©Brigitte Lacombe
Sandoval was born in Cebu, Philippines, an only child raised by a single mother. She became enthralled by cinema as a kid, going to a pre-WWII movie palace and watching family comedies. “I don't remember anything much about the actual movies,” she says, “but I remember being just in awe and impressed by this massive screen where I see actors and these characters, and images unfold before my eyes.”
Bitten by the storytelling bug, she would put on plays and performances with neighborhood kids and classmates from Catholic school. In college, she studied psychology. After getting her undergraduate degree, she moved to New York to attend NYU in pursuit of an MBA, and interned at Focus Features and the Weinstein Company, which provided a crash course in the business.
But her passion remained filmmaking—she got her auteur film education not from film school, but from pirated DVDs sold in makeshift malls, discovering Fassbender, Akira Kurosawa, and Hitchcock movies on her own. This, she says, “became my own curriculum of film studies, and finding my own distinct voice and sensibility as a filmmaker.”
Her first feature, 2010’s Señorita, stars Sandoval as a transgender sex worker in the small town of Talisay—inspired in part by Jane Fonda’s working girl character in Klute, one of her favorite movies. Perhaps due to the country’s deep relationship with Catholicism, Filipino cinema often portrays trans characters as comedic foil, reduced to little more than punchlines. “You can be funny, you can work at a beauty salon because that’s your designated place in society,” says Sandoval. “There's a kind of very strange alchemy of Catholicism and machismo that actually having these drag queen-type trans women make the masculinity of straight men seem more pronounced or more potent in comparison.”
Klute gave her a different way in, both in thinking about her own identity and as a filmmaker. “Especially because she [Fonda] plays a sex worker, an escort—that character is a trope in itself, like the hooker with a heart of gold—but she comes across as very intelligent, morally conflicted, resilient, complicated woman. And to think that this is very early in the ‘70s, that just blew my mind,” Sandoval says. “I wanted to come up with a character like that, that's trans but also Filipina. That was also when I was trying to figure out whether there was a path forward for me as a trans woman, so I was using my art, too, and using fiction to discover a deeper truth about myself.”
While Sandoval had come out as a gay man during her time in New York, she says, something still didn’t sit right. “I felt quite unhappy that [people] were not able to see me the way I think of myself,” she says. She realized that even when she was writing neighborhood plays, “All my main protagonists, and the emotional centers of my scripts have always been women. They had strong, independent women.”
Filming Señorita was a way to explore if this is what she wanted. “I was putting on a mask and a costume, essentially. And I really used it as a psychological experiment to see whether it felt right for me to be in this woman's shoes,” she says. Now, she says she can’t watch herself in Señorita. “That was a very different person,” she says. “The moment that I decided that I was trans was when I realized that I wasn't transitioning to become a girl. I was transitioning to become more fully myself.”
“The moment that I decided that I was trans was when I realized that I wasn't transitioning to become a girl. I was transitioning to become more fully myself.”
Lingua Franca was the first film she made as her true self. The film displays the sure hand and clear eyes of someone with a distinct vision. There’s a simmering tension—and, yes, that sensuality again—that envelops it. The film is a quietly revolutionary tale of an immigrant trans woman. The camera doesn’t fixate on her trans identity —and the camera doesn’t flinch during the intense, erotic sex scenes, either—but still leaves much to the imagination. There are no discussions about transitioning, no deep explanations about gender and sexuality. Olivia, her character, is allowed to just be.
“What made Lingua Franca kind of radical in some ways is that I wasn't making a movie that was Transgender 101—like, ‘Transgender for Dummies,’” she told me when we first talked, from Raleigh, North Carolina, where she has relocated during the Covid-19 crisis from New York. “I wanted to make a movie for myself, where I didn't feel like you have to explain every little thing,” she says. “I told the story on my own terms, and had the audacity to expect the audience to meet me halfway.”
From Lingua Franca
As she’s become more fully herself, so has her work, each new project taking a more distinctive voice and look. Creatively, she feels impelled towards the direction of sensuality (hence the cheeky Twitter moniker). But that’s a stark departure from the Filipino cinematic tradition of social realism. “I started out as a filmmaker saying ‘I want to be known as a serious artist and to be considered a serious artist, my films have to be overtly political and serious and self important,” she says. “A lot of major international film festivals tend to program Filipino films that talk about poverty, the inequality and the squalor that plagues our country. That can be a very first-world exploitative perspective on what our experience and life is like in the Philippines. Yes, my films may be innately political, and they may touch on political themes, but I also want these stories to not focus on the marginalization and victimization of these characters, but on their agency and selfhood and liberation. The best way for me to do that is to make the film subjective, and really explore their thoughts and emotions and their desires.”
Both Sandoval and Lingua Franca co-producer Carlo Velayo are tapped into the growing Filpinix film community in the States and in New York City. With Sandoval’s longtime producer Darlene Malimas, they have connected with Tony- and Grammy-winning producer Jhett Tolentino, and formed a production company, 7107 Entertainment, named after the number of islands in the archipelago of the Philippines.
Of Lingua Franca specifically, Velayo says, “I connected with it on so many levels, not just as a gay man. When you look at Señorita, Apparition, and Lingua Franca, they are still very much steeped in that social realist brush or near realist and trying to convey life as we know it. From [Filipinx filmmakers] Lino Brocka to Brilliante Mendoza to Lav Diaz, that is what Philippine cinema has been known for—people like to call it ‘poverty porn.’ And Isabel is trying to pivot and try something new,” he says.
After wrapping Under the Banner of Heaven, Sandoval begins working on Vespertine, a TV show of her own creation. Centered around a Roman Catholic nun in Los Angeles at the center of a series of killings; we can expect, murder, mayhem, and, yes, sensuality.
Catholicism figures strongly in her work—Sandoval was raised Catholic, attending a Catholic school from childhood through college (the population of the Philippines is over 90 percent Catholic)—and was a dutiful and committed altar boy. But now, she says, “I have an ambivalent relationship with it. Which is pretty evident in the films that I've done so far, especially Apparition.”
Her second feature, Apparition, follows two young nuns in the Adoration monastery in Rizal. The press in her homeland called Apparition, “a religious movie,” but, she says, “it's not, it just happens to be about nuns. It's actually about the political awakening of nuns.” Sandoval was inspired by a childhood memory of watching nuns in front of tanks during the People Power Revolution’s deposing of President Ferdinand Marcos. “I'm used to the notion of nuns being very subservient and docile and submissive.” Apparition was a way “to reconcile how they went from this very toe-the-line kind of women to marching in the streets and being out there exposing themselves to the potential risk and danger.”
She’s currently working on bringing her next feature film, Tropical Gothic, to the screen. The film was inspired by Henri Rousseau’s magical realist painting “Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest.” The surrealist story centers around a priestess who pretends to be possessed to get revenge on her Spanish masters during the Spanish colonial regime in the 16th century.
“I wait until I feel like I have this whole story mapped out before I start writing them,” Sandoval says of her process. “It can take months. I nearly finished the first draft of Tropical Gothic while I was at MacDowell and then I continued writing it through the pandemic.”
Tropical Gothic currently has a budget of $3 to $4 million—which is a king’s ransom compared to her earlier films, funded by her own finances or through grants from the Philippine government.
If her recent work is any indication, these new TV and film ventures are likely to cement Sandoval unironically as the Queen of Sensual Cinema, and rocket her into mainstream media fame. “She's trying to evoke a sense of rapture and desire and yearning when people fall in love,” says Velayo, of Sandoval’s work. “Usually people say that falling in love is lollipops and rainbows and really bright colors, but then sometimes it can also be this very overwhelming anxious period where you're almost being taken over by and possessed by these feelings that you don't understand or can't control.”
In the middle of Shangri-La, which is set on a farm in the Great Depression, her character, a Filipina woman, gives a confession. She sits in a booth wearing a beautiful but simple dress, confesses her sins of love and desire. But the other side of the confessional is not a priest, but her American, white lover. She describes their forbidden love, and how their bodies and souls meld. The dark night sky fills with stars and fireworks. She recites an affirmation, which could be as true for the real Sandoval as the fictional one: “I am magnificent, invincible, sublime. I will love who I want to and I’ll be loved right back.”
Published on February 10, 2022
Words by Tricia Romano
Tricia Romano is working on a nonfiction oral history about the Village Voice, due to be published by Public Affairs/Hachette in Spring 2023. She is a two-time MacDowell fellow and has also been an artist-in-residence at Millay Arts and UCross. She is the former editor-in-chief of The Stranger newspaper in Seattle and has been a staff writer for the Village Voice and The Seattle Times. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, Longreads, Los Angeles, Daily Beast, and Marie Claire. (Photo credit: Celeste Sloman)