Qymira

The word “shade” matters to her. She remembers standing outside in the sun while working on the lyrics, watching how her shadow softened and thinned in places. “The shadow is not that dark, you know, in certain places,” she thought, which led her to ask how much of fear is angle and perspective. “It depends on how you see things,” she says now, “how deep or how coloured your shadow becomes.”

On stage at Manila’s Dolphy Theatre, dressed in the self designed white gown that has become instantly recognisable from the video, that idea became startlingly literal. Behind her, scenes from Shadow Transit flickered; around her, the orchestra swelled; on her, six childhood dreams - movies, music, fashion, orchestra, piano, storytelling, finally shared the same frame. “I hadn’t realized that all six dreams had just come true on this one stage,” she recalls. “With the movie in the background… work with the orchestra, in my own dress, and, you know, do my own song and the score, and play the piano with the orchestra and the movie… behind me.”

The realisation hit so hard that it drove her to tears midperformance. “It was so surreal that it actually drove me to tears,” she says, laughing at herself. Instead of cutting around it, Pedring Lopez told her to lean in: “Use it, whatever you’re thinking about.” She did. The emotion stayed in the take.
That Dolphy Theatre performance now feels like a hinge in her story, a moment where pop, film and couture fold into one another. For Qymira, it was less strategy than revelation. She had designed the gown, written the lyrics, composed the score, played the piano, and embodied both Celeste and herself in the same breath, deliberately blurring the line so audiences could not quite tell who stood at the centre of the story.

Backstage, she found herself asking Pedring Lopez a question that sounded like a riddle: “Do you want me to sing the song as Celeste or as Qymira?” At first, he thought it would be quite fun if she continued the character on stage, as if the movie simply spilled into the music video. Then he wondered whether she might bring more of herself, too. In the end, she refused to choose. “I decided, okay, you know what, I’m going to merge the two together,” she says. “So you can’t tell whether it’s Qymira or Celeste. That kind of emotional marriage in a way.”

Audiences seem to feel that fusion instinctively. People who watched the music video and then saw the trailer told her it felt “almost like a trailer music video,” a continuation of the story rather than a separate promotional piece. That, to her, is the point: a world where her music, her acting and her visual imagination exist in the same breath.

Even the fashion carries narrative weight. The white dress - soon to be joined by other looks tied to a four seasons, story driven instrumental project - is part of how she builds a universe, using fabric and silhouette as extensions of character and mood. This first gown was rushed into existence; at one point she remembers asking herself, only half joking, “How do I make three dresses in a week?” But the pressure underscored something important. “This actually gave me a good beginning to go, right, you know what? This is the direction,” she says. If Celeste is her identity in this film, then dressing her and herself becomes part of the storytelling.

Listen long enough and it becomes clear that this dreamy year has also been brutal. Production delays threatened to derail Shadow Transit just as distribution and casting locked into place, forcing Qymira to step into a far more hands-on producer role than she ever expected. “I was expecting to step in as an actress,” she says. Instead, she found herself right in the middle of the machinery that makes a film possible.

Still, she talks about the experience as a huge learning curve rather than a cautionary tale, a crash course in just how much pressure an independent film can exert on the people trying to hold it together. Faced with the choice to fold or fall, she decided to use it all, channeling her frustration and fear straight into Celeste’s emotional life.

Part of what drives her is a piece of advice from her father that has become both mantra and mischief. “Opportunities never strike at the perfect time,” he told her. “You just need to basically recognize they’re opportunities and grab hold of them and then learn how to do it.” She calls it “a blessing and a curse.” The blessing is obvious: “I will always say yes to something, and then I will go and learn and train,” she says. The curse is that “sometimes you can bite off a bit more than you can chew,” only realising how much you’ve taken on when time is running out.

It is why she agreed to design dresses in a week, train in a new martial arts style in a couple of days, and shoulder responsibilities that could easily have belonged to three different people. She is candid about the fear that comes with that whisper of impostor syndrome, the dread of not being enough but she is more afraid of the alternative. “I’d rather do that than be fully, fully prepared to wait for another opportunity to come,” she says. “Yes, it’s scary, but the opposite is even scarier, of losing opportunities.”

If this chapter has been about convergence, the next one is about how far she can carry that momentum. Early next year she joins a cathedral tour with Collaboro that will put her classical side front and centre in some of the UK’s most atmospheric spaces. “I feel the chills sometimes when I go into a very grand church or cathedral,” she says. “You feel the presence, you know, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re religious or not.” The idea of singing in those spaces, letting her voice rise into centuriesold stone, clearly excites her.
Between dates, she will be promoting Shadow Transit as it rolls into new territories and continues its festival journey, hoping the intimate, emotionally driven story resonates as deeply with audiences as it does with her. Yet when she talks about the project, she rarely frames it as her triumph alone. “It really takes everything and everyone,” she says. Pedring Lopez trusted her enough to let her improvise; the crews who built entire worlds out of raw materials; the orchestra that helped her turn inner weather into sound; the producers and friends who kept nudging the film forward when it might have stalled. “It’s not just my dream, it’s everyone else’s dream as well,” she says.

For all its noir shadows and high stakes action, Shadow Transit ultimately feels like a testament to collective faith: in the right story, the right moment, and a woman determined to meet both with her whole, unfragmented self.




Creative Jessica San @jessicas4n
Photography Jessica San @jessicas4n
Styling Natalie Fajer Wood @nataliefajerwood
HMUA Rebecca Hampson @rebeccahampsonmakeup


Suit, Norma Kamali. Shoes, Tom Ford.

Top, Zara. Trousers, Cos. Necklace, H&M.