A fine diner’s star sommelier opens a new wine bar dedicated to minimal-intervention drops. It could easily be a typical Broadsheet story. But in this case, it’s not – it’s a Brazilian indie film.
Isabel is a charmingly rough-around-the-edges new film by director and writer Gabe Klinger, screening in Australia as part of the 2026 Spanish and Latin American Film Festival.
In Isabel, we find the titular character yearning to be free of her dour boss and unfulfilling job, and dreaming of doing it all by herself. As sommelier at a Sao Paulo fine diner, Isabel (played by Marina Person) is passionate about those rustic, artistic wines often grouped together as “natural”. Such wines are despised by her boss Tommaso (Marat Descartes), but loved by plenty of her female contemporaries. It’s a scenario that Klinger says comes straight from the city itself.
“I came back to Sao Paulo about six years ago, where I was born, and I started noticing that the wine movement in Brazil – especially artisanal wine, minimum-intervention wine – is being led by women,” he says.
Though Person is known better as a longtime MTV VJ in Brazil, Klinger says her off-screen passion for wine helped colour in the detail of Isabel’s character, leading to her receiving a co-write credit.
“I discovered that she has a love of natural wine and small-scale stuff and artisanal production,” Klinger says. “She actually wanted to open up a shop with her husband, and so it just all clicked. Usually actors have to have this period where they learn all this stuff, and she’d already inhabited that world.”
Alongside Isabel’s attempts to go solo and open a wine bar – which includes navigating the world of boisterous American investors and moving a glass-fronted fridge alone on the subway – Klinger shows us his own slice of Sao Paulo. Having spent time living and working in Chicago as a film studies professor and critic, Klinger’s return to Brazil’s largest city revealed not so much what the city is truly like, but his imagined ideal.
Isabel’s house in the film is, in reality, Klinger’s own. But, the director says, the city’s character is changing rapidly.
“I wanted to show a world of Sao Paulo that’s disappearing,” Klinger says. “Marina likes to say that the Sao Paulo of Isabel is my idealisation of the city that I want to live in – the projection of my desire of what I would like Sao Paulo to be like, which is full of cool people who are opening little shops and fighting the corporations and trying to do their own thing.”
Klinger shot the entire picture on 16-millimetre film. The effect is that just as Isabel fights to share that rough-edged style of natural wine, Klinger explores this as a filmmaking aesthetic and visual style. The picture looks warm, nostalgic and handmade, while some scenes cut abruptly as the film runs out – a hazard of filmmaking that, for Klinger, brings real parallels to natural winemaking.
“We decided to just leave in mistakes,” he says. “The film has this sort of fragmentary quality to it, because it was a very low-budget movie, and so there were just days where we just ran out of film. Even if I wanted another take – that’s the bottle, that’s the wine that we made. Yeah, the wine tastes a little funky, the wine tastes a little off. Well, that was the grape that was given to us.”
In the end, that might be the biggest takeaway from Isabel’s journey – that, rather than searching for perfection, it might be best to simply just try to make something of our own.
Isabel screens at Palace Cinemas around the country as part of the HSBC Spanish & Latin American Film Festival 2026. Book now to catch the film in a cinema near you. A special Noche Del Vino screening at Palace Norton Street Cinema in Sydney on June 24 includes a wine tasting before the film starts.
Broadsheet is a proud media partner of Palace Cinemas.
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