Lingua Franca, her third feature film as writer-director, and the first that the trans Filipina filmmaker has shot in her homebase of New York City. “I wanted to distinguish myself with my own sensibility and aesthetic,” she says, describing her style as austere and sparse, but with “a certain lyricism and sensuality and delicacy.”A stark sensuality permeates the Brooklyn-set drama, which stars Sandoval as Olivia, an undocumented Filipina trans woman who works as live-in caregiver to elderly Russian immigrant Olga (Lynn Cohen), and pursues a romance with Olga’s troubled adult grandson, Alex (Eamon Farren).