It’s well known that the Rohingya people, originally deriving from Myanmar, are amongst the world’s most persecuted, yet their plight is often understood more cursorily around the globe, rather than being fully visualised and explained. Akio Fujimoto’s Lost Land [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] is the first feature to be shot entirely in the Rohingya language and was made in collaboration with over 200 people from the community; it transcends the relative artifice of its making to become a powerful account of the displacement and continual trauma they’ve faced. With Fujimoto himself being Japanese, it also represents a rare co-production and international shoot for a filmmaker from that nation. It premiered to acclaim this week in Venice’s Orizzonti section.

Following what’s known as the Rohingya genocide, perpetrated by Myanmar’s armed forces from 2017 onwards, almost half of the community fled to Bangladesh, which is where Fujimoto wisely starts his script. The goal for nine-year-old Somira (Shomira Rias Uddin Muhammad) and four-year-old Shafi (Shofik Rias Uddin) is to travel eastwards to Malaysia for stability and security, as it’s a Muslim-majority country where their uncle has already settled. Beginning the story accompanied by their father, the children undertake a harrowing journey in order for them to attain this, familiar from numerous recent verité-esque fiction features like Io Capitano [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] and To a Land Unknown [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Mahdi Fleifel
scheda film], yet in spite of Fujimoto’s highly endearing and sometimes cute child protagonists, this is no “triumph of the human spirit” pablum. The pervasiveness of stories like Lost Land in our media further underline the refugee crisis and branching issues of forced displacement as the key moral shame of our time.

With on-screen chapter headings written in child-like handwriting counting the days of their journey – following “Day 1” with the successive one, then jumping several days on – the children must precariously journey over land and sea, and from southern Asian border to border. Fragments of exposition on the geopolitical background come from the adults accompanying them, whether intentionally or accidentally, but the director follows each obstacle faced in a practical and observational manner, so that we see the siblings’ utter vulnerability, and then the agency and resourcefulness summoned when the predicament gets desperate. The scariest moments arise during the second-act stop in Thailand, with the human traffickers they’re unlucky enough to meet taking relish in their bamboo-stalk mobile cages. Foregrounding the Rohingya characters’ spirituality, whether young or old, is also an apt choice; Somira and Shafi mimic their father’s sujud late in the film, emphasising the timely point that Muslim civilian populations are often those whom the wider world deems expendable.

Particular kudos for Lost Land’s success must also go to DoP Yoshio Kitagawa, last seen beautifully rendering the natural world in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s stealthy mind-bender Evil Does Not Exist. The camera mobility and the judicious image grain are slightly deceptive and make one believe that it was captured on 16 mm celluloid, but the cinematography is indeed digital (and how else would the nighttime exteriors look so good?). Although audiences might feel wary of yet another film with this subject matter, Lost Land gains academic credence by capturing the Rohingya people’s ordeal this way, but is also imbued with hard-won lyricism from its tale of young souls seeking salvation.

Lost Land is a production by Japan, France, Malaysia and Germany, staged by E.x.N K.K., Panorama Films, Elom Initiatives, Cinemata and Scarlet Visions. Its world sales are overseen by Rediance.