Tokyo International Film Festival 2025 Dispatch —
Part Two
Sasha Han — Wednesday, 7 January 2026
The second part of our dispatch centers the legacy of colonialism and its intersection with complex identity, ancestry, and land ownership. It seems apt to begin this section with a brief prologue on Lav Diaz’s Magellan (2025). Since its premiere at Cannes, Magellan has received immense attention in cinephile and industry circles in its inspired ambition, camera choice, and the director’s sex life. The film opens with an indigenous woman noticing a white man and running away in horror while screaming, “The prophecy of our ancestors has come true!” Cue tableaus of the aftermath of the Portuguese empire’s colonial carnage in the sea and soil of Malacca. Magellan’s great odyssey brings him to Cebu, where he forms a “pact” with the local chieftain Humabon. In an act of colonial revisionism, it is revealed that the so-called evil entity Lapu-Lapu was constructed by Humabon as cover for their attack on Magellan and his men, proposing an alternative history in which the historical conflict between Lapu-Lapu and Humabon was a ruse. Divination is only as powerful as your will to bend prophecies to fit your vision.
My land is your land
Following The Story of Southern Islet (2020) and Snow in Midsummer (2023), Chong Keat Aun continues his passionate excavation of inured Malaysian Chinese injustices in his fourth feature. In Mother Bhumi (2025), agreements of white men and monarchies consolidating their empires cause sudden seizures and unauthorized sales of ancestral lands and homes between the border of Malaysia and Thailand. Set in nineties Kedah, the film stars Fan Bingbing as Hong Im, a widowed farmer, community advocate, and powerful shaman. By day, she’s toiling on the fields or appealing to bureaucrats over land disputes caused by the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909; by night, she dispels evil curses placed on villagers.
In her previous role in Green Night (2023), Fan maintains a glowing, vampiric beauty and an astonishing suit of plot armor amid the danger and violence prowling about the seedy underbelly of Seoul. Here, she gives herself over to Hong Im completely, resulting in an award-winning performance at this year’s Golden Horse awards. Unrecognizable in a prosthetic nose and a fake tan, Fan not only sheds her glamour but recites Bahasa Melayu lines with familiarity and convincing ease.
Still, a sequence where Fan speaks Chinese brought a moment of hilarity, and, upon reflection, deep consternation. After a neighbor faces the seizure of her house, Hong Im heads to the municipal office. She discovers that the office of a government ally, a friend of her deceased husband, has been cleared out, along with all photos and traces of her spouse that adorned the walls. Distraught, she confronts a Malay officer on duty before rifling through a bin in search of the photos, crying in Chinese, “They’re bullying me! They’re bullying me!” Hong Im may still be grieving, but I’m unsure how the poor staff on duty contending with an AWOL colleague could be constituted as an act of bullying.
In fact, all the people who cause her grief are Malay. By the end of the film, the source of the curse that resulted in her husband’s demise is revealed to be the work of a bomoh, one that looks like an Orang Minyak, whom Hong Im confronts in his shed filled with vials of foetuses on the village fields. This choice follows criticism for Snow in Midsummer, which fixated on the effect of racial riots on the Malaysian-Chinese. Without diminishing the injustices that have plagued the Chinese community in Malaysia, it is concerning that one racial group is depicted as villainous while the real-world influence of Sinophone business, culture, and language envelops Southeast Asia.
Rithy Panh’s We Are the Fruits of the Forest (2025) similarly attempts to address the plight of the indigenous Bunong people in Cambodia while unwittingly undermining its message in other ways. The documentary opens with archival footage from Cinema Français of a thriving Bunong people. They live in symbiotic harmony with the forest, practicing animism and sustainable cultivation of natural resources. Arranged in diptych, these images recur throughout the film as the Bunong community attempts to hold onto their way of life despite large-scale land grabbing for redevelopment projects and multinational hydroelectric dams.
The film captures the evocative rhythm of a life lived in tandem with nature...until a ghostly image of a Bunong woman’s bare breasts recurs at random moments, disrupting the film’s purpose. When asked about the choice to bookmark the film with such an image at the Q&A, Panh stated that he simply liked the image. But where is the responsibility of using an image like that in such a casual, unserious manner while dealing with an incredibly existential topic as neocolonialism? The footage came from the archives of a French institution, an empire that once colonized Cambodia without proper context, documentation, and identification of the people captured on film. That is already an act of appropriation. For Panh, director of S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), one of the most confronting and important documentaries of our time, to replicate the image without addressing any of these considerations could be constituted as a betrayal, doubling the violence and extraction of a community that is already in danger of being eradicated.
To pretend, to play
In renowned documentary filmmaker Lau Kek Huat’s narrative feature The Waves Will Carry Us (2025), Ah Lao (Wei Chun Chan) escapes from family in Malaysia to work for an immigration agency in Taiwan. In the opening scene, after going through the hoops for an immigration, his clients ask about his accent and make underhanded compliments about how “young people like him” can adapt anywhere. While they initially point out the similarities in their cultures, the scene ends with, “I never thought the person helping us emigrate would be Malaysian. You pretend to be Taiwanese really well.”
While Mother Bhumi seeks an indignant affirmation on how Chineseness must be protected, The Waves Will Carry Us proves that being Chinese does not save one from ostracism in Chinese societies. Racial, cultural and religious identity is only as important as the benefits redeemed from the government. The conversation cuts to a sequence set 107 years ago, when Ah Lao’s migrant ancestors sought a new life in Malaya and settled down where it suited them. Though it does eventually result in a situation where identity cards cannot easily be attained, the film seems more interested in examining Malaysia’s systemic issues and corruption. When Ah Lao returns home for his father’s funeral, Muslim leaders appear to inform the family that their father converted to Islam for government benefits and must have an Islamic burial instead. The scene that unfurls, alongside a subplot involving a Bersih 4.0 rally for clean and fair elections, underscores that a national identity cannot simply be built on racial or religious lines. Ultimately, a sense of belonging to society and the world has to be desired by the individuals themselves.
Refugee-centered films have become a staple in European and North American film circuits. Lost Land (2025) represents the few that address the Rohingya crisis in our region. Written and directed by Akio Fujimoto, the film follows children Shafi and Somira, played by real-life siblings Muhammad Shofik Rias Uddi and Shomira Rias Uddin, who leave their refugee camp in Bangladesh and cross the sea to Malaysia to reunite with their uncle. When we first meet Shafi and Somira, the siblings are engaged in a round of Red Light, Green Light. As the circumstances of their journey become more dangerous, Somira surmounts her fears and weariness of having to evade authorities through play—that is, until an unexpected discovery by the border patrol leaves Shafi alone in Malaysia and trapped in an unending game of hide-and-seek for his family.
The lack of attention or care about Rohingyas across Southeast Asia (save the efforts of Indonesia and Malaysia to accept refugees) means that a sprawling project centered on the crisis would have to come from a non-Southeast Asian filmmaker. Indeed, the film is an international co-production involving Japan, Malaysia, France, and Germany. Fujimoto has consistently made films about immigration and migrant workers, most notably in Along the Sea (2020). Beyond a personal interest in the crisis—having married a woman from Myanmar—, he avoids appropriating and extracting the tragedy of Rohingya for film material with the participation and collaboration of over 200 Rohingyas. Considering his extensive compilation of this wealth of information, I found the choice to create a narrative film instead of a documentary far more compelling. Instead of asking his collaborators to relive their trauma in a series of oral accounts or risk exposing routes used by refugees, the potential of fiction empowers survivors while committing their experiences for the record.
Closing words
The 2025 edition of the Tokyo International Film Festival featured an impressive number of Southeast Asian films in its programme. Yet as it continues to consolidate its position among Asian film festivals, attention and celebration was largely directed at established and mature directors with success in critical reception and the box office. When the spotlight shone on emerging filmmakers, the directors seemed to possess East Asian sensibilities, featuring Sinophonic languages and cultural influences. In consideration of TIFF’s ambitions to compete with the “Big 3” festivals, for future editions, the festival would be remiss to not expand its program further towards the incredibly diverse and rich landscape that is Southeast Asian filmmaking today.