Meet the trans woman of colour chron­i­cling life in America’s margins

What does ​“the per­son­al is polit­i­cal” even mean any­more? Coined in 1970, the sen­ti­ment achieved a broad and almost instan­ta­neous plu­ral­i­ty of res­o­nance dur­ing the women’s lib­er­a­tion move­ment. Clear­ly there was a deep and shared need to acknowl­edge the inalien­able polit­i­cal dimen­sions to the ​“per­son­al realms” women had been con­fined to for centuries.

What­ev­er rhetor­i­cal detours the expres­sion has tak­en along the way, it now goes with­out say­ing that aspects of the ​“per­son­al,” like sex, sex work, mar­riage, child rear­ing, and domes­tic labor like house­keep­ing, con­sti­tute some of the most polit­i­cal­ly defin­ing expe­ri­ences of many peo­ples’ lives.

There are few direc­tors work­ing today who bet­ter under­stand the porous bor­der between not only the per­son­al and the polit­i­cal, but the present and the his­tor­i­cal, than Isabel San­doval. All three of her fea­tures, includ­ing her lat­est, Lin­gua Fran­ca, inter­link the past and future, indi­vid­ual and mar­gin­alised lives, and the cor­rupt polit­i­cal frame­works that enclose them so deft­ly that one begins to ques­tion why we insist on dis­tinc­tions between them at all.

San­doval was born and raised in Cebu, the Philip­pines’ sec­ond largest met­ro­pol­i­tan area after Mani­la. Her first fea­ture, 2011’s Señori­ta, takes place in a small­er city in Cebu province called Tal­isay. In Señori­ta San­doval plays Don­na, a fair-heart­ed yet shrewd trans woman with her feet plant­ed pre­car­i­ous­ly in two worlds. Don­na has come to Tal­isay to take care of her son (who thinks she’s his aunt), and winds up get­ting involved in a grass­roots pro­gres­sive cam­paign to unseat Tiong­son, the city’s cor­rupt, many-term incum­bent mayor.

Mean­while, Don­na con­tin­ues steal­ing back to the big city where she used to do sex work, vis­it­ing with a loy­al client she comes to dis­cov­er is the secret, most inte­gral and most crim­i­nal cog in the machin­ery that keeps Tiong­son in pow­er. When he gifts her with a blank cheque, Don­na is thrust into an eth­i­cal vice from which no good way out is easy, and no easy way out is good.

Though Señori­ta lacks the visu­al lus­tre of Sandoval’s fol­low­ing two films and is almost impos­si­ble to find online, it set the tem­plate for the kind of work she’d pro­duce through­out the decade. She once described all three of her fea­tures as focus­ing on ​“mar­gin­alised women who are forced to make intense­ly per­son­al deci­sions in a fraught sociopo­lit­i­cal con­text.” When asked to com­ment on this char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion, she laughs, ​“Anoth­er way of putting it is, I’m drawn to women with secrets.”

Com­pare the hero­ine of Señori­ta to Lin­gua Franca’s hero­ine, Olivia (also played by San­doval), and you come to grasp not only how the world around San­doval has changed, but how pro­found­ly trans­for­ma­tive the decade has been on her. She’d already come to the US pre-Señori­ta to pur­sue a Master’s degree, but pro­duc­tion on that film and its fol­low-up, Aparisy­on, brought her back to the Philip­pines. She’s now offi­cial­ly head­quar­tered in New York.

She’s gone from hard­scrab­ble fundrais­ing and resource accu­mu­la­tion with her pro­duc­ing part­ner Dar­lene Mal­i­mas on those first two films to hav­ing Lin­gua Fran­ca pre­mière at VIFF’s Venice Days pro­gramme and be picked up by Ava Duvernay’s Array dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pa­ny for glob­al release on Net­flix. Most crit­i­cal­ly, since Aparisy­on pre­miered in 2012, San­doval has transitioned.

At every fes­ti­val where Lin­gua Fran­ca has screened, it has been the first fea­ture film direct­ed by (not to men­tion star­ring) a trans woman of colour to do so. Tun­nelling fur­ther than ​“women with secrets” into her own the­mat­ic and nar­ra­tive pre­oc­cu­pa­tions, San­doval high­lights ​“a ten­sion between polit­i­cal pow­er and a kind of sen­su­al or emo­tion­al pow­er” that char­ac­teris­es her work. ​“At their core,” she says, ​“my films are about pow­er and its nego­ti­a­tion.” It is here where Olivia takes leave of the path that Don­na paved before her.

Lin­gua Fran­ca tells the sto­ry of Olivia, an undoc­u­ment­ed Fil­ip­ina trans woman work­ing as a live-in care­tak­er for an age­ing Russ­ian immi­grant named Olga (Lynn Cohen) in Brighton Beach, New York. Olivia is try­ing to fast-track her nat­u­ral­i­sa­tion process as Trump’s xeno­pho­bic crack­downs land like bombs in real time.

When a romance blos­soms between Olivia and Olga’s surly yet child­like adult grand­son Alex (Eamon Far­ren), Olivia’s own lim­i­nal­i­ties threat­en to engulf her. ​“It could have been me. It was Glen­da two months ago,” Olivia says to Alex after they wit­ness ICE sep­a­rate a cou­ple in Brooklyn’s Fil­ipino neigh­bour­hood. ​“Who’s Glen­da?” Alex asks. Olivia replies calm­ly, in a con­ster­nat­ed tone: ​“Olga’s oth­er care­tak­er, the woman in the pic­ture you thought was my sister.”

Donna’s van­tage point on the mar­gins of Fil­ipino soci­ety in Señori­ta pro­vides her with the unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to affect broad polit­i­cal change. Olivia’s same posi­tion on America’s mar­gins in Lin­gua Fran­ca, how­ev­er, is com­pound­ed by her undoc­u­ment­ed sta­tus. It’s enough to force her in the oppo­site direc­tion – she must mobilise every­thing she has to remain as invis­i­ble to the state as possible.

Vis­i­bil­i­ty, after all, has two faces, and as mirac­u­lous as it is for Sandoval’s humane por­traits of some of the most scape­goat­ed and polit­i­cal­ly vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple in the world, she’s ful­ly aware of visibility’s lia­bil­i­ty for the indi­vid­ual in the con­text of the carcer­al state.Where a hero­ine in anoth­er film might sim­ply lean into love with curi­ous aban­don, Olivia must ​“nego­ti­ate her grow­ing attach­ment to some­one like Alex,” who is fun­da­men­tal­ly, despite what­ev­er else he might be, ​“an Amer­i­can man with papers.”

These are the forces at work beneath the placid sur­faces of Sandoval’s films. Nowhere is this con­trast between the tran­quil, painter­ly com­po­si­tions and ​“roil­ing emo­tion­al under­cur­rents” bare­ly con­cealed below more evi­dent than in Lin­gua Fran­ca. It is Sandoval’s most restrained work to date, and arrives in the most frac­tured polit­i­cal land­scape in recent mem­o­ry. ​“It’s a kind of dra­mat­ic irony I love as an audi­ence mem­ber,” she says. ​“The emo­tions my films traf­fic in are not sim­ple or straight­for­ward.” Indeed, nei­ther are the polit­i­cal back­drops they are so ver­tig­i­nous­ly con­trast­ed against.

Mov­ing into the pro­duc­tion phase on her fourth fea­ture, titled Trop­i­cal Goth­ic, San­doval feels ​“a sense of my sig­na­ture, or my sen­si­bil­i­ty as a direc­tor” coher­ing around her. ​“I’ve always embraced my unique­ness and my oth­er­ness,” she says. Since hon­our­ing that expe­ri­ence has paid great div­i­dends for the young film­mak­er so far, what bet­ter way for­ward is there than to ​“lis­ten to my own intu­ition and inspi­ra­tion, and see where they take me.”

Lin­gua Fran­ca is released on Net­flix on 26 August.