First Light

Bluesky

When it comes to it, especially if it’s early and unexpected, most of us are deeply afraid of death. How much worse, too, if one does not know what one’s fate will be thereafter, and believes one might face hellfire. Sister Yolanda (Ruby Ruiz) can only reassure the young man on the operating table so much. She’s an honest woman, and she does not know what will become if him, but she stays at his side, offering what comfort she can. She doesn’t understand why no-one else is helping him, why the doctor insists that nothing can be done. He is crying out for his family, but his father arrives too late, and is not allowed to hold him.

It’s one troubling incident in a series which leave Yolanda, who had devoted her whole live to the convent, uneasy about the Church and the morality of both its officials and its congregants. The more she bothers others, gently trying to find out more about the young man, who was a construction worker, the more she finds herself shut down, reminded of her lowly station. She wants the local priest to hold a proper funeral for him, potentially improving his chances of getting into Heaven. It’s a simple request. Why do people keep getting in her way?

What could have been a whodunnit emerges, in the skilled hands of director James J Robinson, as something much more interested in why than how. Local aristocrat Linda Dela Cruz (Maricel Soriano), who expects Yolanda to provide regular nursing care for her bedridden mother, makes a show of turning to her for wisdom but is slow to absorb it. The Church hierarchy seems more concerned with money than justice, and nobody local seems willing to go out of their way for an outsider.

Whilst this is going on, the bats roosting in the convent cause a panic amongst some of the nuns. The building itself seems to be on the verge of collapse, walls coloured by mould. The damp gets everywhere. In this febrile atmosphere, Yolanda tries to coach a young novice, Sister Arlene (Kare Adea), who is on the verge of taking her vows. But in the end, does it really matter what they believe about God? Isn’t it more important to do godly work?

Gently paced and beautifully shot by Amy Dellar, who gives each setting its own particular luminosity, First Light, which screened at the 2026 Glasgow Film Festival, is a thoughtful and lyrical film unafraid to do things differently. Full of small observations which drift together like silt to build up the layers of the narrative, it takes form almost imperceptibly until a fundamental change emerges.

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