‘Lost Land’ review: Two young siblings from Myanmar journey alone in search of a better life

Dir/scr: Akio Fujimoto. Japan/France/Malaysia/Germany. 2025. 99mins

Two Rohingya siblings attempt to get from Rakhine State, Myanmar — the place this Muslim minority has been persecuted for years — to an uncle in Malaysia, a number of thousand miles away, in Misplaced Land. Directed by Japanese filmmaker Akio Fujimoto, this isn’t a conventional fictional narrative with a plot and character growth a lot as a fly-on-the-wall portrait of the ordeal confronted by the kids as they cross borders and lose members of the family — and the dear little info they’ve about their final vacation spot. As such, it’s exhausting to attach emotionally to the characters, making the movie play like a coolly distant documentary more often than not.

Exhausting to attach emotionally to the characters

Misplaced Land premieres in Venice Horizons, notable for being the primary characteristic solely within the Rohingya language. It follows Fujimoto’s earlier works Passage Of Life (2017) and Alongside The Sea (2020), which each revolved about Southeast Asian characters settling in Japan. Whereas his newest work harnesses an essential topic, it could be a problem for Misplaced Land to seek out an viewers past human rights-based festivals and comparable showcases.

9-year-old Somira (Shomira Rias Uddin Muhammad) and her four-year-old brother Shafi (Shofik Rias Uddin) are initially accompanied by their grandfather and an aunt as they’re hauled onto a ship beneath cowl of evening to get out of Myanmar with a gaggle of different Rohingyas. They don’t have any backstory — it isn’t even ever acknowledged why they’re leaving — nor are their characters actually developed past the plain variations between Somira, who’s older and a lady, and Shafi, who’s youthful and a boy. They’re largely simply wide-eyed children who complain about being chilly or scared or each; although Somira, because the eldest, will take the lead when essential. 

The voyage is lengthy and arduous, as underlined by on-screen chapter headings that present what number of days the duo have been travelling. Their closing vacation spot, an uncle in Malaysia, is sensible, as it’s a predominantly Muslim nation – although this, too, is rarely defined. That mentioned, western viewers will see clear parallels between what is occurring to the Rohingyas on this nook of Southeast Asia and the various movies depicting folks fleeing their properties to attempt to attain Europe or the US seeking a greater life.

As Somira and Shafi journey by boat after which over land by way of Thailand, they need to take care of ’brokers’, folks smugglers who take the determined for hefty sums of cash and who are usually not afraid of exploitation and violence. Whereas the movie fortunately doesn’t veer into the realms of kid trafficking and the like, Fujimoto, who additionally wrote the screenplay and edits, struggles to discover a constant tone that may accommodate each these harsh realities whereas making certain his protagonists are usually not put instantly in hurt’s approach. 

Cinematographer Yoshio Kitagawa, who shot Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s crystalline Evil Does Not Exist (2023), right here goes for a down-and-smudgey method, with loads of the movie occurring in darkness or penumbra (together with a storm at sea with spectacular clouds and lighting). This method helps to elucidate the kids’s sense of disorientation, unease and worry – though it additionally means the viewers shouldn’t be at all times solely positive what’s taking place. 

The remainder of the technical package deal is strong for what seems like a guerrilla shoot, with, as per the press notes, some 200 Rohingyas collaborating within the making of this well-intentioned characteristic. Ernst Reijseger’s rating is used sparingly, so the danger of veering into melodrama is stored to a minimal.