Filmmaker Isabel Sandoval Explores Forbidden Love in Miu Miu Tales' New Short Film

During a time when our outside world has become an unfamiliar landscape, filmmaker Isabel Sandoval explores alternate, interior worlds in her latest work, Shangri-La. Premiering today on Miu Miu's website, the short film is the first Miu Miu Women’s Tales installment of 2021, and the 21st in the ongoing series, which includes previous shorts by female filmmakers including Chloë Sevigny, Mati Diop, and Ava DuVernay.

Sandoval expands her oeuvre as a writer, director, editor, producer, and actress with this latest project. Her previous work includes the history-making Lingua Franca—a movie about an undocumented trans woman from the Philippines who moves to New York City and seeks to find a man to marry to gain citizenship—which became the first film directed by a trans woman of color to screen at the 2019 Venice International Film Festival. The film, now available on Netflix, was acquired by Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing last year and was recently nominated for the 2021 Film Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award. Sandoval’s ability to create restrained, relatable yet beautiful films wrapped around interpersonal relationships and identity is reflected throughout her work.

Set in California during the Great Depression, a time when interracial relationships were prohibited by law, Shangri-La centers on a woman’s fantasy of intimacy and freedom as she imagines different futures where she, a Filipino farmhand, may openly love her white American paramour. The story unfolds as the couple role-play in a church confessional, the woman confiding her desires to the man. Soon, she tells him of the dreams she’s had of her parallel lives as a warrior, a free woman, and of her realization about love. In her reverie, her drab dress is replaced by sparkling Miu Miu pieces, the fashion underscoring the woman's transformation and fulfillment of her inner self.

Already onto her next project and currently sequestered at the Yaddo artist residency in upstate New York, Sandoval speaks with L’OFFICIEL about creating Shangri-La and her exploration of womanhood and femininity in her work.

L'OFFICIEL: Shangri-La was produced during the pandemic. Did that have any effect on the kind of story you wanted to tell?

Isabel Sandoval: Indirectly. I knew I wanted to shoot a film indoors in enclosed spaces with just two characters. As a filmmaker I work well and I'm in my element when I'm working with limitations. There's a documentary by Lars Von Trier called The Five Obstructions. He is a director assigning another director to make a short film with a parameter. I wanted to shoot something that was just in an enclosed space, so I chose a church confessional as the main setting. That was inspired by a particular scene from the film The Immigrant by James Gray with Marion Cotillard. Over the course of the scene you feel like the rest of the confessional falls away and slips into darkness and we're just focusing on Cotillard's fair, vulnerable, open face. That was a creative jump off point, and it fit quite well with my thematic interests now as filmmaker in that I want to focus on and dig deeper into a woman's inner emotional life and her interiority.

My film that came out last year, Lingua Franca, on the surface is about an undocumented trans woman and touches on topical issues like immigration and the experience of a trans woman of color in the U.S. but it actually feels impressionistic and subjective in that its prevailing mood and atmosphere is one of anxiety and paranoia and tension, which was an emotional and mental state of Olivia, the main character. I wanted Shangri-La to feel that way as well. Although it starts off as a rendezvous with these two secret lovers, halfway through the film it goes into an internal monologue or stream of consciousness where the woman, who is a Filipina farmworker, imagines alternate selves and alternate worlds where she can be truly herself without any fear or shame or guilt. 

L'O: Earlier you mentioned your previous feature Lingua Franca, which in some ways explores similar ideas of womanhood. Did you see Shangri-La as creating a dialogue with your other work?

IS: I'm also working on a new script. I've been just writing down random ideas for scenes, but I started coming up with ideas for this almost two years ago. It's going to be set during the Great Depression in California, which is the same milieu as Shangri-La, and its also an interracial love story. In that feature, it's the reverse. Instead of a Filipino woman, it's a Filipino man in a secret relationship with an American woman. Shangri-La, I thought would be an excellent opportunity for me to test out some ideas I had for the future and also to test out some aesthetic flourishes that I want to do with my upcoming feature for a script that I've already finished writing called Tropical Gothic.

It's a period drama set in the Philippines in the 16th century, very early during the Spanish colonial regime and my big aesthetic idea for Tropical Gothic is how I can use the elements of atmospheric horror to conjure the experience of falling in love and romantic ecstasy, because in the movies falling in love is almost always roses and lollipops and fantastic and amazing. But there are some people where that feeling of falling in love and realizing you're becoming vulnerable to another person can be quite terrifying and haunting. I wanted to test the waters with some of the imagery in Shangri-La. 

L'O: The film's title is in reference to a fictional utopia. What does that mean to you?

IS: The original title was Splendor, and I thought it sounds lovely and like euphoria, it sounds nice to the ears. But I thought it was a very conventional fashion title. Shangri-La crossed my mind shortly after we wrapped production and I looked at the etymological origins of the word. It’s a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizons by the British author James Hilton. He decides that Shangri-La is a mystical, harmonious valley enclosed somewhere in [Tibet], in Asia. I wanted to reclaim that term as an Asian artist, because he's British and coined it. That's why the title for the short is Isabel Sandoval Shangri-La, because I'm trying to recolonize the term and have it come from an artist of Asian heritage.

L'O: You wrote, directed, and star in Shangri-La as well as Lingua Franca. Given that you're involved in so many facets of production, how much of yourself do you see reflected in your work?

IS: None of my works are quite autobiographical, although we're taught to write what you know. But I think it's just so boring to write about what I know. Cinema, and art in general, allow us to imagine and experience lives and a world outside of our own. Starting a new character, I want it to be as distant as it can possibly be from my own experience . With Lingua Franca, it looks pretty close because I'm also a trans woman living in New York City, but the rest of it is fictional. It does feel authentic because from an emotional and psychological standpoint, I am Olivia. I've experienced being intimate and being in emotional relationship with a man who initially wasn't aware I was transgender, for instance. But it's striking a delicate balance that I'm writing about what I've experienced but also transmuting it enough for a narrative fictional medium, and trying to do something unexpected or different so it doesn't feel predictable or cliche to the audience.

With Lingua Franca, when you read the premise, you expect it to be a certain kind of movie, very social realist and issue-driven. But my approach was to turn it into something more delicate and sensual and lyrical, because when you mix things up with something that feels like a formula that's how it can illicit a genuine emotional response from the audience. When they see they're about to experience something that they already have before, and to pull the rug from under them. That's what I wanted to do with Shangri-La as well, because when you think of not just people of color at that time, but of others experiencing economic hardship, you almost always look at people from a political or economic perspective, but with Shangri-La I wanted to depict this woman's sensual and emotional and imaginative life. I am a political filmmaker but in an oblique, unexpected way. I think on characters who lived in a specific socio-political setting, but I don't necessarily make my film explicitly or overtly political. In emphasizing the subjectivity or the inner emotional experience of the characters I help them come truly alive. I go beyond their existence as mere statistics and flesh them out as living, breathing human beings, and how I do that is by making them feel things like falling in love and wanting and desiring.