Into the Light

Seven years in the making, the debut feature of film-maker Nicole Midori Woodford makes waves on the global film festival circuit before its local premiere at the Singapore International Film Festival 2023 this month

- Hashirin Nurin Hashimi

A few years before she passed away in 2019, Nicole Midori Woodford’s Japanese grandmother developed dementia after a stroke, and she came to live with the Singaporean director’s family just as Woodford was recovering from a particularly traumatic period in her life.

“She opened up to me about her life in Japan, and how she was late for work one day and missed the train to Hiroshima which meant that she narrowly escaped the atomic bomb that went off that morning,” says Woodford, recalling one of their conversations. “She later married my Eurasian British-Portuguese grandfather, and they moved to Singapore to start a new life. [I felt that] it was my grandmother’s way of reassuring me to look forward and move on with my life despite encountering trauma.”

The themes of family, trauma and healing are explored in Last Shadow At First Light, Woodford’s debut feature which made its world premiere at the prestigious San Sebastián International Film Festival 2023 in Spain this September. The supernatural drama follows the journey of a teenage girl, who has the special ability to communicate with the spiritual world, from Singapore to Japan, uncovering the mystery of her strange dreams and her mother’s disappearance years ago.

“I took inspiration from the relationships within my own family, and explored the stories of people who are going through their own encounters with trauma or loss. But I also wanted to have a supernatural take on it,” says Woodford. “I’m rather spiritual at heart, and I do believe there’s a supernatural side to the world. I wrote [the script] based on some of my own encounters, but [the film] is more fiction than autobiographical.”