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LINGUA FRANCA New Auteurs

Description

Talent attending: Nicole Cosgrove (Executive Producer), Jerry Kerkman (Executive Producer), Isabel Sandoval (Director), Jhett Tolentino (Producer), Carlo Velayo (Producer)

Olivia is an undocumented Filipina trans woman and the home health aide for Olga, an elderly Russian American woman in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. While tending to Olga’s increasing dementia, she finds her life intersecting with the woman’s grandson, Alex, just back from rehab and trying to get his life together. With Alex’s work and sobriety struggles, and Olivia’s searching for a way to get her green card and a have life free of fear from ICE, they have too much going on to need a budding relationship. But that’s not how fate works. Writer/director Isabel Sandoval (SEÑORITA, APPARITION) deftly plays Olivia as a woman capable of finding incredible strength and grace in a world that seems so against her life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. –Eric Moore

Bios

Isabel Sandoval is a New York-based filmmaker recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as a “rarity among the young generation of Filipino filmmakers” for her “muted, serene aesthetic.” With her third feature LINGUA FRANCA (2019), she becomes the first transwoman of color to direct and headline a film competing in Venice. Her two other features include SEÑORITA (2011), which premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival. SEÑORITA also won the Emerging Director Award at the 2012 Asian-American International Film Festival in New York. Her second feature film, APPARITION (2012) was widely acclaimed in its Philippine theatrical release. It competed in the New Currents section at the Busan International Film Festival and won the Audience Award at the 2013 Deauville Asian Film Festival in France.