'Lost Land' director captures play and peril on a migrant's journey

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Sometimes the best way to come to grips with an issue is to see it through the eyes of a child. Akio Fujimoto's "Lost Land" frames the plight of the Rohingya people — a stateless, predominantly Muslim ethnic group who've suffered decades of persecution — through the experiences of a pair of children on a treacherous journey from Bangladesh to Malaysia.

Shafi, 5, and his 9-year-old sister, Somira, are too young to understand the reasons why they have to embark on the trip, leaving behind the relative safety of a refugee camp and braving border crossings and unscrupulous human traffickers. They don't know about the deadly military crackdown in 2017 that forced hundreds of thousands of their kin to flee from Myanmar's Rakhine State.

"The audience, in a sense, also don't know about the history or background of the Rohingya," says Fujimoto, 38, speaking at a publicist's office in central Tokyo. His own son, who's just about to start elementary school, plays quietly with one of the staff while we talk.