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The failure of the the law to protect people who need it, particularly refugees, has long been a subject of director Akio Fujimoto’s work. His “Passage of Life” sees an undocumented Burmese become torn apart in Tokyo after circumstances force them to uproot themselves again and move to Myanmar, where the children have never lived, having been born and raised Japanese. 2020’s “Across the Sea” concerns the exploitation of foreign workers, as it follows a trio of Vietnamese women working in Japan who are unable to get hospital treatment after their employers confiscates their passports.

“Lost Land” is Fujimoto’s third link in this powerful chain of dramas concerning the extreme hostility of the establishment towards displaced people, this time focusing on the Rohingya, an Islamic people effectively without a country following genocide in Myanmar. The film concerns what it feels like to have no floor beneath one’s feet; it’s a film in constant, jarring, elliptical forward motion as it charts the journey of a Rohingya family from Bangladesh to Malaysia. (It also feels of a piece with the Tokyo International Film Festival competition title “Mother Bhumi,” also interested in the region’s history, particularly towards the “various ethnic groups that were embittered against each other by the dictums of British rule.”)

Fujimoto’s film quickly leaves the small comforts of home, as it watches children (real life siblings Muhammad Shofik Rias Uddin and Shomira Rias Uddin) play hide-and-seek before their aunt and uncle, frantically pack for their emigration; they immediately have to make unpleasant choices in leaving behind what material possessions they have in order to better care for the kids. The older sister, Somira — aged nine — is quickly and tragically forced to grow up in the space of a week as she finds herself responsible for her four-year-old brother Shafi during this harrowing exodus. Boat captains bark at the families to give up their phones and shut down what little expression the passengers can muster (one man sings “I wonder when I can return to our home country”). Later in the journey the family run afoul of smugglers in Thailand, which leads to an even more desperate situation as the children have to fend for themselves. 

Fujimoto shoots in an almost documentary-like, fly-on-the-wall style from the very beginning, but this isn’t to say that the film is cold or analytical in its depiction of this story. The camera often orbits the children from their point of view, highlighting what they see and feel (such as the claustrophobia of the boat they board to Malaysia), and the flight-or-survival instincts they’re forced to learn. Fujimoto deliberately makes the camera operator feel present in the scene being depicted as a kind of invisible witness: In some moments you feel the cameraperson stand up along with the characters, or in one scene where the children steal some bamboo out of desperation, they feel present as they run with them. The plight of the Rohingya is often discussed in terms of its scale, so Fujimoto’s visual efforts to pare things down to a human level feel incredibly meaningful. 

The director pieces the film together in elliptical fashion. It starts with title cards announcing “Day One” and “Day Two,” but then suddenly skips ahead to “Day Eight” and then “Day Fourteen” as time begins slipping. A story from Somira’s aunt about a mango tree which survived the burning of their village is met with the response of a dreamlike montage of the fire, narrated with a prayer for lost souls from the Qur’an. That sequence then slips to show that a passenger on the boat has died, specifically an old man who affirms that “compared to our past, this is nothing.” The torment of “Lost Land” is perpetual, never aestheticizing misery but rather operating in the sense that it mourns for those in the stories relayed to the director (Fujimoto worked directly with Rohingya people in the making of the film, which is notably the first to use the Rohingya language). Crucially, the tragedies of the film don’t come from a sense of the filmmaker’s cynicism, but from compassion.

That feeling is made clear in a sequence that’s practically shot like the testimonials in a doc: a montage of Rohingya refugees discussing the dreams they’ll achieve once they reach Malaysia. Those dreams include opening a car business, becoming a teacher, or in the case of the children, buying shoes and a hat. The film feels at its sharpest when the main family is embedded with other groups of refugees, which allows it to function as a window into a series of wider stories both about what the Rohingya refugees are forced to endure in their search for a home, as well as the outright hostility of the police towards them in various countries. Though interested and in some cases hopeful for its characters in rare moments of kindness and charity, there’s no magical thinking to be found here, as the tragic final notes of the film’s ending linger painfully even as one character clings to the memory of the aunt’s mango tree, as though to make the point that while the sharing of stories can provide some kind of personal salvation, that salvation can only go so far. 

Grade: B+

“Lost Land” premiered at the 2025 Tokyo International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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