Back to selection
Exclusive Teaser: Isabel Sandoval’s Moonglow Closes First Look 2026
Filmmaker is happy to share an exclusive teaser for Moonglow, the latest from Filipino filmmaker and actress Isabel Sandoval. Her follow-up to the acclaimed Lingua Franca (2019) will have its North American premiere at the Museum of the Moving Image on Sunday, May 3, as the closing night screening of First Look 2026.
Sandoval stars as Dahlia, a police officer working in 1970s Manila under the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. Described in an official synopsis as a “noir melodrama,” Moonglow follows Dahlia as she becomes enmeshed in a clandestine, Robin Hood-adjacent scheme that involves stealing from a corrupt superior officer and redistributing his wealth to struggling city residents. When she is called upon to investigate her own crimes, Dahlia reconnects with her mark’s nephew, a handsome, upstanding lawyer who she shares a romantic past with. “I’ve summoned a ghost,” says Dahlia in the teaser. “And I’m powerless to stop it.”
In a director’s statement, Sandoval writes:
Ultimately, Moonglow is about the ghosts that linger inside a love story. Some belong to personal memory, to the life two people might have lived together. Others belong to history itself, to a nation struggling to define itself in the shadow of empire and authoritarian power. I wanted the film to feel lush and romantic on the surface, but quietly unsettled underneath, as if the past were always waiting just beyond the frame.
A “Production Diary” artist talk will precede the MoMI screening of Moonglow, with Sandoval, cinematographer Isaac Banks, co-editor Daniel Garber, composer Keegan DeWitt, and producer Alemberg Ang in attendance.
