Ahead of VIFF 2026, Joella Cabalu reflects on making space for intimate conversations about identity and relationships
Vancouver filmmaker’s latest feature documentary First Comes Love: Nakabingwit dives into the complexities of interracial relationships
First Comes Love: Nakabingwit. Photo courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada
VIFF 2026 presents First Comes Love: Nakabingwit on October 3 at SFU Woodward’s, October 7 at the International Village, and October 10 at Alliance Française
WHEN SHE WAS 19 years old, Joella Cabalu almost talked herself out of filmmaking before she’d even started.
“At the time, what I thought in order to be successful in film was to be aggressive, abrasive, very demanding, and—most of all—a white man,” the Filipino-Canadian documentarian tells Stir over Zoom. Setting aside her interest in film production, Cabalu studied art history at UBC, all the while attending movie festivals and screenings in her free time.
Years later, at what was then called the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival, Cabalu attended a screening of Toshimi Ono’s documentary Oh Sushi: From the Land of the BC Roll, With Love.
“It sounds so cliché, but it was truly the first time I felt like, ‘Oh, if this woman can do it, I certainly can do it too,’” she recalls. Soon after, Cabalu quit her job as an administrative assistant at a nonprofit organization and enrolled in Langara’s film-arts program.
Cabalu has since made a name for nuanced documentaries that explore identity, relationships, and belonging. Her first mid-length documentary, It Runs in the Family—a personal exploration of queer identity, familial ties, and acceptance in the Filipino diaspora—won the audience choice awards at both the Seattle Asian American Film Festival and the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. Her other works include the documentary shorts “Crystal Pite: Wordless Language” and “Koto: The Last Service”, about the closing down of a beloved Japanese family restaurant in Campbell River.
Her latest documentary, produced through the National Film Board, is called First Comes Love: Nakabingwit. Set to premiere on October 3 at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival, it delves into the complexities of interracial relationships. Tinged with a rom-com sensibility, the feature film follows three Filipino women and their white partners as they find space for difficult conversations about race and identity.
First Comes Love: Nakabingwit. Photo courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada
Threading the three love stories together is the filmmaker’s own; the documentary opens with a scene where a friend congratulates Cabalu on dating a white man.
“I had this jarring reaction,” she says of the conflicting feelings of pride and discomfort she felt in that moment. “The stickiness of those feelings made me wonder, ‘Do other Filipino women in interracial relationships feel this way?’”
Although the idea had been sitting with Cabalu since 2012, it wasn’t until the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that she felt its urgency. Amid the growing traction of the Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate movements, a social media post made by Justine Abigail Yu (one of the subjects of the film) caught the filmmaker’s attention.
“She made a post of a selfie with her white British boyfriend, asking women of colour who are with white partners, ‘How are you doing in this moment?’” she explains. “And just seeing how many people responded and related to how difficult it was, I really felt like a new context and relevance became clear. And that’s when I took the idea off of the back burner and started to develop it in earnest.”
First Comes Love isn’t a story of perfect resolutions, but rather an intimate portrayal of how couples navigate uncomfortable discussions with empathy and openness.
Those are the kinds of tensions Cabalu keeps returning to in her work. “I’ve always been interested in people’s interior lives and emotions—things that you don’t necessarily get access to,” she says.
Moving on from the familial and romantic relationships she explored in It Runs in the Family and First Comes Love, Cabalu is already mapping out her next potential project on adult friendships. “I’ll speak it into existence,” she says with a laugh. “I’m going to call it a trilogy.” 
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