First Light is an astonishing debut feature from acclaimed Australian photographer James J. Robinson, and a film perfectly placed in the Melbourne International Film Festival’s Bright Horizons competition — the strand reserved for first and second features by the world’s most promising new voices. Drawing on years spent living and working in the Philippines, Robinson channels the trust he has built with local communities into a film that is part slow-burning crime drama, part embedded portrait of everyday life, and part tender study of a convent struggling to survive in a country at once devoutly religious and whose institutions are profoundly corrupt.
The premise is modest, even cloistered. An ageing nun, Sister Yolanda, played by Philippine screen legend Ruby Ruiz, welcomes the younger Sister Arlene, a quietly magnetic Kare Adea, into her order. As they open up to each other, their bond soon becomes the still centre of a widening moral storm. When Yolanda is called to administer last rites to a young man fatally injured on a construction site, the pair are drawn into a web of graft and moral compromise that continually tries Yolanda's steadfast ethics. The very morals that Yolanda has spent her life practicing and administering are, it seems, being used to justify acts she finds unjustifiable.
“You’ve spent too much time inside these walls, it’s made you naive to what goes on outside,” Yolanda is told. “It’s God’s job to judge, not yours.” But her conscience, now awakened, cannot be pacified and she moves with a conviction that her faith demands action, however costly.
Shot on 35mm film and 4K, First Light’s greatest strength is revealed in its trailer, Robinson’s extraordinary eye. His photographic work has featured in The New York Times, Vogue, and the National Portrait Gallery and shows a vivid sensitivity when it comes to using light, texture, and lived-in spaces, a sensibility that deepens into cinema. Drifting clouds, dawn shadows, the vivid colours of a crowded street at noon, hundreds of candles flickering on an altar – each frame is composed with precision and warmth. The beauty here is never ornamental. It carries the dust, humidity, and devotional rhythms of the place, making every image feel inhabited rather than staged.
The film’s creation was nearly as dramatic as its story. To tell it on his own terms, Robinson navigated extreme weather, bureaucratic delays, and permissions that went far beyond the typical paperwork of a film shoot. Local Indigenous elders performed ceremonies and made offerings, even an on-set exorcism was needed to ensure he could film what was necessary. In this way, First Light joins a lineage of Philippine shoots haunted by the same restless spirits blamed for derailing Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and The Thin Red Line. The film also marks the first-ever official co-production between Australia and the Philippines.
In a MIFF program crowded with international prestige titles, First Light stands out not for celebrity cachet but for the quiet conviction of its storytelling and the clarity of its gaze. Robinson has delivered not just a debut worth noting, but a work that firmly announces a major new voice in Australian and Southeast Asian cinema. This is a quiet miracle of a film.
Director: James J. Robinson
Cast: Ruby Ruiz, Kare Adea, Maricel Soriano
Writer: James J. Robinson
Producers: Gabrielle Pearson, Jane Pe Aguirre, Christelle Lou Dychangco
Cinematographer: Amy Dellar
Composer: Ana Roxanne Recto
Editor: Geri Docherty
First Light screens at MIFF from Sunday 10 August to Saturday 23 August 2025. Visit MIFF.com.au for tickets.