Miu Miu Women's Tales #21 - Shangri-La Trailer
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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.

SHANGRI-LA, directed, written & edited by #IsabelSandoval, is the 21st commission from #MiuMiuWomensTales. The acclaimed short-film series invites today’s most profound and original female directors to investigate vanity and femininity in the 21st century.

The title Shangri-La summons the idea of earthly paradise, isolated from the world. For some immigrants, America was a promised Shangri-La, whose reality in the 19th and early 20th century, turned out to be a different story. Isabel Sandoval’s film turns that historic gaze around — through the additional lens of a trans woman of color — into an optimistic portrait of freedom, liberation and elusive Utopia, away from prejudice.

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