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Australia has selected James J Robinson’s feature debut First Light as its official submission for the Best International Feature Film category at the 99th Academy Awards, The Hollywood Reporter has learned exclusively.

The first-ever Filipino-Australian co-production, First Light is the first Tagalog-language film ever submitted by Australia for the Oscars.

Australian Agata travels to Sarajevo to work on a war novel. Met with suspicion by the locals, Agata comes to a greater understanding of her responsibilities as an author.

The Valley is not a traditional documentary. While it maintains a focus on character-driven stories, director Ian Darling makes a concerted choice to present life as it is – not with a guiding commentary or a cohesive, linear narrative, but as a day-to-day journey filled with small, quiet moments.

Focused on the people living and working in Kangaroo Valley, New South Wales, The Valley is more like a series of photographic vignettes, all of which reveal so much about rural living, the responsibilities of work and how serenity defines individual lives.

You won’t find much dialogue here – only what comes naturally and quietly in moments where the people of Kangaroo Valley come together, or when clucky animals need comforting.

One of the most charming and delightful films to screen at the 2026 Melbourne International Film Festival is the community-created documentary Digby & Camille. Seasoned documentarian Trevor Graham pairs up with acclaimed artist Digby Webster to craft a beautiful film about love, creativity, and the support we give each other along the way.

The winners for Sydney SFF announces Audience Award Winners. Australian Feature – First Light directed by James J Robinson runner up.

My wonderful colleague Andy Hazel has already written beautifully on James J. Robinson’s First Light. I echo his sentiments but feel the need to explain how transcendent I found the work.

In North Luzon in the Philippines stands a four-hundred-year-old convent. Inside the crumbling building live a community of Catholic nuns whose peaceful sisterhood is reflected in their communal work and gentle respect for each other and their devotion to God. James J. Robinson opens the film with the nuns lighting candles pre-dawn. It’s a dreamlike and meditative image of shared purpose. It could be mistaken for their daily ritual but it’s not. The power is off in the convent (a consistent issue) and as light begins to filter through what we see is the slow wreckage of time taking a toll on the home of the women. One young novitiate is afraid of the bats who have also taken up residence. Sister Arlene (Kare Adea) will later speak to her roommate and supervising elder nun, Sister Yolanda (played by the legendary actress Ruby Ruiz) that she sees such things as omens. Arlene and her brother saw spirits in the forest in her rural southern Philippine town. In her mind they were not craven idols but messengers from God. Sister Yolanda listens carefully and calms Arlene. Sister Yolanda is in essence calming. She’s also encouraging, wise, funny, joyous, and self-sacrificing. Later a man will tell her that she is “Of God, but not of the Church"

Filmed over seven years, this moving documentary follows celebrated Chinese-Australian artist Jiawei Shen creating Welcome to Babel – a four-panel, 130-square-metre epic capturing the failures, hopes and bloodshed of 20th-century communism. A major Chinese artist before escaping to Sydney in 1989, Shen was witness to much of the pain he paints.

It makes sense Babel is ugly and completely overwhelms the eye. The documentary, directed by Shen’s long-term friend James Bradley, is decidedly more measured – a portrait that takes in an immense historical landscape but never loses sight of Shen’s jokes, joys and sense of life.

Filipino-Australian filmmaker and photographer James J Robinson has been booked and blessed since his debut feature film, First Light, premiered at the 2025 MIFF, where it won the Blackmagic Design Best Australian Director Award.

Robinson and his film have been on what he calls “a full world tour” ever since, gaining momentum and acclaim on the festival circuit.

“It’s been a really fun journey, if not exhausting,” he said. “There’s an endless well of excitement for me with the film.”

Deborah Mailman sat in rusty red sand on Arrernte country in central Australia, and she felt her character’s deep grief. She was filming a scene in Warwick Thornton’s 1930s frontier western Wolfram, playing Pansy, an Indigenous woman whose children have been stolen from her. As her bundled baby cries, Pansy silently cuts her hair off with a knife – “a grieving ritual”, Mailman says – even though her missing children might still be alive.

Warwick Thornton said that Wolfram acts as an antidote to its stunning forebear Sweet Country – a film that cost the director and his cast and crew a great deal emotionally to make. Wolfram is a story of survival, and the protagonists surviving are children; children who were taken for their mother and made to work. Such was, and is, the case for Philomac in Sweet Country and remains so in Wolfram, with the character now being played by the truly excellent Pedrea Jackson.