James J Robinson Never Wanted To Be a Photographer. With First Light, He Makes His Filmmaking Debut

Update, August 25, 2025: James J Robinson won the Blackmagic Design Best Australian Director Award at the 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival. The award was judged by Charlotte Wells and the Bright Horizons jury.

There was an exorcism on the set of First Light. According to Filipino Australian filmmaker James J Robinson, one of his crew members was “possessed” in the middle of production in Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines.

It’s perhaps ominous – or maybe too on the nose – for a film that touches on themes of spirituality, religion, mysticism and connection to the land.

“It was this frantic moment where the more Catholic Filipinos were reading the Bible, the more indigenous Filipinos were burning things and trying to call a witch doctor, and all the white Australians were running around like, ‘Get her to the hospital, call the ambulance’,” Robinson tells Broadsheet.

“Everyone was fighting over [the question of] ‘What do we do about this possession?’, with people who believed in it and people who didn’t. We ended up calling the exorcist and we had an exorcism.

He says it was “definitely an interesting moment where, I think, the different cultures [of the crew] came together in this weird, awkward way”.

Behind the scenes shot from First Light

Robinson grew up in Australia with a Filipino mother who didn’t speak much Tagalog at home, so her kids wouldn’t be bullied in school. As a child he understood bits and pieces of the language, but he isn’t fluent today. This posed a challenge to filming First Light, a film set in the Philippines with dialogue mostly in Tagalog.

“As I grew up and wanted to reconnect with the Philippines, this film almost became an excuse to go back to the country and reacquaint myself with my ancestral indigenous roots out there,” he says. “It’s almost like the point of making the film was to go back and right that wrong of my mother’s needing to assimilate to the West growing up in Australia.”

Still from First Light. Courtesy of MIFF

First Light centres on Sister Yolanda, a middle-aged nun (played by veteran actor Ruby Ruiz, who starred in Prime Video’s Expats) who lives a quiet life of devotion in the mountains of northern Luzon. But her conscience and faith are left shaken after she delivers the final rites for a young man injured on a construction site operated by a wealthy family.

Robinson is no stranger to work that challenges religion. In 2021, he broke into his old school, St Kevin’s College in Melbourne, and took a photo of a burning blazer. The act was a protest against the Catholic all-boys school’s patriarchal culture, and drew attention to homophobia, misogyny and toxic masculinity. First Light is a continuation of Robinson’s use of art to interrogate both personal faith and institutionalised religion.

Still from First Light. Courtesy of MIFF

“I’ve been on a bit of a journey with Catholicism, and I think this film, through metaphor, really maps out the beginning and end [of that journey], in the sense that it follows this character who is so deeply devoted to the church – almost in a blind way. That was very much the way that I was raised,” he says.

“And then something happened – I realised that I was gay and didn’t fit with what was supposedly part of the ‘natural world’, and that I would end up in hell. That put me off that path and made me start questioning things.”

Robinson developed what he described as “this fury against the church” as he confronted his shame and frustration, eventually coming to a realisation about the distinction between Catholic tenets, and organised religion.

“There is a very stark difference between the actual core religion and its beautiful ethics – about trying to treat your neighbour with kindness, about charity and caring for other people – and the church that coexists alongside it. [It’s] the institution which is corrupt, not the religion itself.”

Behind the scenes shot from First Light

This is Robinson’s first feature film. Up until now he’s worked as an established photographer, shooting editorials and magazine covers of Sydney Sweeney, Rose Byrne, Harris Dickinson, Lily-Rose Depp, Kylie Jenner and more. His eye for lighting and composition is clear from the film – a testament to both his sensibilities and those of his cinematographer, Amy Dellar.

“I think through photography, I was able to learn what my voice is as an artist. And by the time it got to making my first film, I had the confidence in knowing what I wanted to say [and] how I was going to say it,” he says.

He actually never wanted to be a photographer. He fell into it after taking photos of friends, and suddenly his images were getting published and he was booking shoots. But writing and making films was always his goal.

“Whenever I was on a photography set, I always approached it as a film. I would light things in a particular way, and my approach to giving direction to my stylists or my models was more like a character thing,” he says. “What draws me to film is that it’s such a new medium of storytelling, in the grand history of storytelling. I think its potentials are still yet to fully be explored, and that really excites me.”

First Light makes its world premiere at Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) on Sunday August 10. A wider cinematic release will take place in Australia and New Zealand after the festival. First Light is also in the running to win MIFF’s $140,000 Bright Horizons Award for first- and second-time filmmakers. MIFF runs from August 7–24 across Melbourne and Victoria.

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