On a hot day in April on the set of her film Moonglow , director and lead actress Isabel Sandoval didn’t need a heavy hand to command the room. Dressed in a cocktail-length, black-as-night evening gown with decadent silk gloves pulled up to her elbows, she paced between the working set to behind the director’s table with a slow, relaxed elegance, so calm that you wouldn’t think the crew was filming a scene so pivotal. In the space packed with extras and film crew, the smell of cigars would immediately transport you, in body and in feeling, to her envisioned 1970s Manila, enveloped in that “lyrical, poetic, and sensuous” atmosphere she had so meticulously built.
The energy was palpable. But it wasn’t because it was fuelled by a sense of urgency, but rather, and so obviously to me, by a knowing trust: in her sole vision, and in the story that she was telling. The two LED screens perched on the center table were fed footage from the working set’s Camera A and B.
Isabel’s eyes would graze over every movement in her latest take with careful precision, from every slight upturn of the corners of her lips, every place her eyes would linger, to every soft inhale. To her own expressions or every potential miss in composition, she would come away with a set of notes, rising from her seat to position herself in front of the camera once more. The cycle would repeat for another six or seven takes before she would finally come back to one she was satisfied with.
Her crew kne.