Lingua Franca

An intimate, melancholic portrait of an undocumented trans woman navigating precarity, identity, and unexpected connection in New York City.

Olivia, an undocumented Filipina immigrant paranoid about deportation, works as a caregiver to a Russian-Jewish grandmother in New York. 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.