On faith and freedom: James J Robinson talks about making ‘First Light’

To process this, Robinson wrote First Light. The film follows Sister Yolanda (Ruby Ruiz), an elderly nun working as a nurse in a remote mountain convent. When she is asked to bless the young construction worker who dies under unusual circumstances, the ensuing moral dilemma forces her to question whether she has dedicated her life to a flawed institution.

To ensure Sister Yolanda’s perspective felt authentic, Robinson spent months immersed in churches and convents in the mountains around Baguio. “It was the small moments—nuns sneezing, brownouts, early mornings—that grounded the film in reality and helped me get into their perspective,” he reminisces.

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The production itself became a journey of reacquaintance with the philosophy of the IPs (Indigenous Peoples), highlighting enduring values such as optimism and kapwa. Robinson credits his creative producer and eventual star, Emmanuel Santos, as his “guiding light when it came to reacquainting me with precolonial Filipino wisdom”. A renowned documentary photographer in his own right, Santos portrayed Cesar, the deceased worker’s father. After finishing the script’s first draft, Santos met Robinson, which led the filmmaker to meet Sister Carmen, Santos’s real-life sister, whose grace and composure became the direct inspiration for Sister Yolanda.

“I think what I’ve found is that there is a deep yearning among many Filipinos, at home and in the diaspora, to reconnect with both the land and our ancestors, to heal the wounds of colonisation that sought to eradicate a knowledge system thousands of years old,” he reflects.

For his debut, Robinson assembled an absolute powerhouse cast, including Maricel “The Diamond Star” Soriano as Linda Dela Cruz, veteran actor Rez Cortez as Edward Dela Cruz, and National Artist Kidlat Tahimik as Diwa. Despite his established career, the director approaches his craft with reverence. “It’s my first film, but I think no matter how many films I make, I’ll always be a student of the craft,” he states.

“Working with so many screen legends in the Philippines was really just another opportunity to learn from them,” he notes. Soriano taught him how to meet an actor in a vulnerable, emotional place, while Tahimik served as a crucial reminder to approach the filmmaking process with flow. Robinson views his role not as a hierarchical commander, but rather as someone who is “there in service to the people I brought to the project”.

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To visually translate Sister Yolanda’s internal world, Robinson and cinematographer Amy Dellar established a strict visual language. Because Yolanda is “slow, intentional, graceful”, the camerawork and editing rhythm had to match.

They utilised wide-angle lenses almost exclusively throughout the film, featuring perhaps only a single mid-close-up. This deliberate restraint served a thematic purpose: “We wanted to do this to always situate our characters within their contexts: trapped within crumbling walls, freed in the open expanse of a forest.” It also allowed the actors to emote through their entire bodies rather than relying solely on facial expressions.

Robinson enlisted composer Ana Roxanne, an American experimental musician known for blending jazz, choral, electronic and Hindustani sounds. Together, they married ambient textures with traditional orchestral instruments to bridge the past and present. Roxanne’s restraint ensured that the score articulated the characters’ spiritual evolution without aggressively pushing the audience’s emotional response.

The film opens with a profound quote from José Rizal: “I enter the future with a memory of the past”. For Robinson, a mixed-race director, this historical memory is deeply personal and empowering. Coincidentally, after completing the film, he discovered that his own great-great-grandfather had been a resistance fighter in the Filipino uprising against both the Spanish and the Americans.

“I think it’s pointless to discuss how we can improve the world without paying respect to the people who have fought before us,” he asserts. He believes that preserving knowledge and awareness about IPs is vital because “the solutions to the problems of this decade are already there if we are willing to look back at human history”.

The production’s ethos extended well beyond the screen, leading the team to the Masungi Georeserve on 6 May to engage with the conservation team there. They discovered that sustainable financing and resourcing make the difference when it comes to effective watershed preservation. This holistic approach deeply resonated with the film crew, providing the perfect way to pay respect to the land they filmed more than helping to regenerate it.

Robinson draws a poignant, structural parallel between his protagonist and his homeland. “When telling the story of Sister Yolanda, I realised that at a certain point, I was telling the story of the Philippines,” he says. She is a character who “grew up at one with the land, then at a certain point abandoned it for stony convents”, leading to a crisis of identity.

This mirrors how the relationship some Filipinos have with the land was “deeply severed during colonisation of our islands as new knowledge systems were introduced and forced,” he says. In Masungi’s real-time battle for environmental sovereignty, Robinson finds profound hope. “It’s a return to the kind of ecosystems that were here long before us,” he concludes, cementing the film’s ultimate message of communal healing and decolonisation.

For him, the real goal is something deeply raw and human. Robinson views his current work: “a humble attempt to grasp at freedom: on a political level, on a deeply internal one, a social one”. He poetically refers to First Light as his “first, imperfect, humble stone” laid on the long pathway to human truth.

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