Exorcisms and film shoots don’t usually go hand in hand but for James J. Robinson the two intertwined for his debut feature First Light.
The writer-director, who has Australian and Filipino heritage, was making his first film in the remote mountains of the Philippines in 2024 when a female crew member became “possessed” while shooting in a 500-year-old church.
“It was just this crazy moment,” Robinson tells Deadline. “My second AD came up to me to tell me that a girl called Grace had a sunstroke and when I went into the costume room, she was on the floor with two of our biggest guys from the lighting team holding her down. She kept saying, in a deep voice in Tagalog, ‘I’m not Grace’.
“The Catholic Filipinos on set began to call an exorcist, whom they had on speed dial, while the more indigenous Filipinos were burning things and trying to call a witch doctor. Meanwhile, the white Australians were running around and called an ambulance. It was this moment of chaos where everyone, with different beliefs, was trying to figure out how to solve this one problem.”
The crew member was ultimately taken into the church and locals performed an exorcism – something Robinson says is a fairly normal occurrence in the Philippines. “She didn’t remember any of it,” he says.
It’s certainly a surreal experience for any first-time director but for Robinson it felt particularly uncanny given First Light was his attempt to not only reconnect with his Filipino roots but also an examination of his ever-changing relationship with the Catholic faith.
The film, which stars Ruby Ruiz, Kare Adea, Maricel Soriano and Emmanuel Santos, is set in the rural mountains of the Philippines where a young construction worker dies in unusual circumstances. An elderly nun, Sister Yolanda [Ruiz], is forced to reckon with his death and face the unavoidable questions it raises about the church and community she’s dedicated her life to serving. Shot entirely in the Philippines, First Light premiered in Rotterdam earlier this year. It’s also screening at the Glasgow Film Festival this week, where it is competing for the festival’s Audience Award.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about why these things [like exorcisms] are so common in the Philippines and why it’s normalized,” Robinson tells Deadline. “And the closer I get to reacquainting myself with Tagalog and speaking what my mom used to speak to me when I was younger, the more I realize that so much of that language leaves space for ghosts.
“For example, if you’re walking in the forest and there’s a path that not many people have walked down recently, you always say ‘Tabi-Tabi Po’, which translates as ‘Excuse me, sir’. So, you’re addressing these invisible spirits that are running around on the ground. This is just in the language.”
Robinson admits that while the incident was a “crazy one”, he and his crew felt safe afterwards and, if anything, it played into the whole experience of reconnecting to his roots. “There are parts of myself that are so inherently Australian and other parts of myself that are inherently Filipino and a lot of this stuff doesn’t equally lap over so this film was a way for me to connect with those dualities. And shooting in the Philippines also meant embracing the culture and the land.”
Robinson, who began his career as a photographer, initially wrote the script for First Light “out of anger” after Australia’s conservative government in 2021 attempted to pass the Religious Discrimination Bill, which would give any religious-backed institution the right to discriminate against someone. “So, for instance, I could have been expelled from my Catholic school for being gay – that’s essentially what they were trying to put into Parliament.”
Luckily, the bill didn’t pass, and Robinson even spoke in Parliament in Victoria to weigh in on his experience of being queer at a Catholic school. “At this time, I was angry not at the church, but at the institution of the church. I think I had gotten to the age where I could recognize that Catholicism was a very kind and beautiful thing at its core, but when politics start to get involved, then they can co-opt to help support very unethical things.”
He continues: “I’ve been on this journey from being a very devout Catholic and then being very angry at the church and then ultimately ending up in a religious and spiritual place that is more my own and takes parts from the church but also parts from indigenous ways of thinking. When I was able to map out my own journey, I then just put characters in different places to represent those different things.”
Funding a film that examines faith for a first-time director was no easy feat and Robinson recalls many funding bodies and financiers encouraging him to make the story into a horror film, but he admits he’s happy he “stuck to his guts.”
At the core of the film is Yolanda, an inherently “good” person who exists in a modern world of power systems and institutional corruption. “I wanted to write her in a way where she sees the world and yet still chooses to stay hopeful and graceful and optimistic,” says Robinson. “When we approached this as more of a universal story rather than an Australian and Filipino one, that’s when the doors started to open.”
He continues: “For Yolanda, she’s witnessed some kind of injustice, but she sees how it’s tied to deeper politics in the region and how it interweaves with power structures. We all have questions of faith in our own lives, for instance when we lose people or bad things happen to us. But I think when people make that connection between institution, power, structures, capitalism and your faith, that’s when it’s a lot harder of a question.”
English (US) ·