The best Isabel Sandoval’s movies

Olivia, an undocumented Filipina immigrant paranoid about deportation works as a caregiver to a Russian-Jewish grandmother in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, NY. When the man she’s secretly paying for a green card marriage backs out, she becomes involved with a slaughterhouse worker who is unaware that she’s a trans woman.

It’s California, during the Great Depression. A woman is confiding her most intimate thoughts in a church confessional, while the man on the other side listens silently and intently. But this is no ordinary religious ritual seeking salvation. The woman — a second generation Filipino farmhand — is rapt in roleplay reverie, her sensuous words aimed at her white American lover, during a historic period when such interracial relationships were forbidden by state law. The confession box transforms into a romantic time machine, ecstatic and melancholic, traveling into alternate futures. She manifests as multiple, dazzling women, and they can love freely. This is the 21st commission from Miu Miu Women's Tales​ series.

Wanting to quit sex work in Manila and start a new life, Donna, a transgender woman, gets her chance when an old friend asks Donna to look after her 12-year-old son Tomas while she works overseas for a year. Donna moves to a small town to look after Tomas only to find out that the town mayor who is seeking re-election is a crony of one of her regular clients back in Manila. In her efforts to break away from her past, she becomes entangled in the town’s local politics and ends up leading a double life.