Does the examination of migrations always need to lean on pessimism or trauma? A hectic day unfolds for a Chinese courier working in New York, a North Korean defector struggles to navigate Seoul’s LGBTQ+ community, a young woman seeks her heritage and sense of self after her father left South Korea for Latin America many years earlier. With such stories, the Focus: Migrations section at the Five Flavours Film Festival brought breath, empathy, and hope to its cinematic journey through experiences of relocation.
Migration has always been here – people have long relocated in hopes of improved lives or new beginnings, or to escape war, discrimination, or personal challenges. Why is it important to talk about it right now? Although it is a phenomenon shaping our modern world, the public debate still tends to downplay or ignore it. Voluntary and forced, individual and collective – migration reshapes the societies around the world, fostering multicultural communities and complex identities, while also generating new sources of friction. East and Southeast Asia are no exception. Here, as well, social structures tend to escape simple frameworks.
“Focus: Migrations presents exactly that – migration as a lived, emotional, and structural reality, reshaping the personal, social belonging, and the cinematic language itself.”
Contemporary Asian cinema is not indifferent to the societal phenomena, addressing migration more and more often, with angles on the topic as diverse as the continent itself. While, for instance, Southeast Asian films highlight recurring themes of labour migration, gendered precarity, and transnational families (especially in Malaysian, Singaporean, Thai, and Filipino cinema), the new wave of Asian filmmakers often portrays migrants negotiating fragmented identities, cultural hybridity, and the tension between tradition and modernity.
Focus: Migrations presents exactly that – migration as a lived, emotional, and structural reality, reshaping the personal, social belonging, and the cinematic language itself. It is a multi-voiced overview of various facets of migration – from national borders to the boundaries of identity. To add to the latter, this year’s programme includes a surprising addition in the form of films made outside Asia, questioning the idea of “national cinema” and highlighting the diasporic fluidity of the self.
Search for belonging
In The Waves Will Carry Us (人生海海, 2025), Ah Yao, a migration agent based in Taipei, returns to his native Malaysia for his father’s funeral, only to discover that his father converted to Islam in his final years. This unexpected revelation means that the Taoist funeral will not take place, and the body is set to be buried in a Muslim cemetery. Together with his siblings – his sister, who runs a restaurant, and his politically active brother – Ah Yao embarks on a journey to reclaim their father’s body. By portraying the family over the centuries, Kek-huat Lau (known for discussing issues surrounding Southeast Asian history in his films) manages to make the personal conflict a lens through which the family reflects on their migratory past, exploring how Malaysians of Chinese descent navigate questions of identity, nationality, and belonging.
Inspired by Teng Kuan Kiat’s short story collection The Stories of My Wonderwall (2021), and through such an intimate family story, the film examines the pursuit of better lives, the challenges of cultural and governmental discrimination, and the choices that continue to shape diasporic communities today. There’s a whole spectrum of migrant experiences, with a carefully constructed narrative about emigration, building a home in a different environment, while finding oneself in a new reality, along with years of a deepening identity crisis. Also, there is the final scene proving that such experiences are not a thing of the past yet still present and, unfortunately, will become more and more common.
Also tapping into the past, present, and future, Cecilia Kang, an Argentinian director of Korean descent, structures her film in three parts. In Elder Son (Hijo Mayor, 2025), Lila (born in Buenos Aires to a family of Korean immigrants, echoing Kang’s own experiences) has always felt like an outsider in her own country. Perpetually seen as a visitor, she begins to question her roots, sense of belonging, and herself. Her father, Antonio, who left Korea years earlier in search of a new life in South America, carries the weight of past decisions whose consequences continue to shape the family’s present.
The three parts are then: Lila’s present, Antonio’s recollections, and a tender documentary segment featuring Kang’s own parents, photographs, and memories – all contributing to an intimate, deeply personal exploration of cultural division and the search for a home that truly feels like one’s own. Although with each part being stronger on its own than a bit jarring whole that is presented to us, trying to blur the lines between fiction and documentary, Kang’s feature reflects on how migration shapes identity across both geography and memory.
Invisible survival
Oasis of Now (Những Nấc Thang Sẻ Chia, 2023), a Malaysian slow cinema mood piece, draws on close observation of migrant workers in Kuala Lumpur, where, within a quiet apartment building, the hidden lives of undocumented workers quietly unfold. Among them is Hanh, a Vietnamese migrant balancing her work as a cleaner and caretaker with the longing for the daughter she left behind. Her daily routine may appear ordinary, but beneath the surface, her life is a delicate act of survival in a city that depends on her labour while keeping her on the margins.
Marking a feature directorial debut for Chee Sum Chia, a compelling new voice in Southeast Asian cinema, it portrays the nuanced realities of displacement, alienation, and survival, while exploring resilience, hope, and the search for a place in a world that often renders outsiders invisible. Oasis of Now received a special mention from the People’s Jury at the 18th Five Flavours Film Festival. This year has returned in the online Aftertastes section, resonating strongly with the themes of the Focus: Migrations.
Meanwhile, Take Out (2004) documents the everyday realities of migration, focusing on the costs of survival outside the “legal” sphere without sentimentality or spectacle. Here, we are in New York’s Chinatown, where on a rainy afternoon, Ming Ding, a Chinese food delivery worker, races against time to repay his debt to the migration mafia. Every delivery, every tip, and every step through lifts, stairwells, and cramped apartments reflects the high-stakes rhythm of survival. The camera follows him closely, capturing the small sounds, gestures, and pressures that define a day in the life of a migrant navigating the city’s hidden economies.
Directors Sean Baker (Anora) and Shih-Ching Tsou (who premiered her first own feature, Left-Handed Girl, this year) immerse the audience in the Chinese diaspora, using raw, instinctive street-level cinematography and neorealist techniques to convey constant motion and relentless choice. They understand perfectly the empathy that is best achieved through witnessing. This low-budget gem turns the mundane into an intense, humanist portrait of resilience and the complex mechanics of migration – especially importantly resonating in today’s USA.
Identity in negotiation
3670 (2025) follows Cheol-jun, a young North Korean defector in Seoul, as he navigates language school, part-time work, and the city’s nightlife while grappling with isolation due to his background and sexual orientation. A chance encounter with Young-jun opens him to new experiences, offering a glimpse of connection and self-discovery. Park Joon-ho’s feature debut sensitively portrays the lives of LGBTQ+ youth and defectors, highlighting everyday struggles, identity, and the desire to live on one’s own terms in a world that often seeks to define them. Disjointed, yet natural. Lonely, yet hopeful.
A different look at marginalisation is offered in The Land of Morning Calm (아침바다 갈매기는, 2024). When veteran captain Young-guk returns from sea without the young fisherman Young-su, he is confronted by a family unwilling to accept the boy’s disappearance. As the village gradually abandons the search, buried tensions and fractures within this rural community begin to surface.
Using the mystery as a point of entry, Park Ri-woong highlights the overlooked complexities of South Korea’s rural “multiculturalism”, portraying the community’s conflicts with clarity and restraint. The film’s quietly mounting unease reveals a place where harmony is fragile and unspoken divisions run deep.
On the other hand, Manta Ray (กระเบนราหู, 2018) explores the Rohingya refugee crisis and its psychological impact. In a Thai seaside village near the Myanmar border, a fisherman takes in an unconscious stranger he finds in the forest. As the two men grow close, their quiet companionship is abruptly disrupted when the fisherman disappears, leaving the newcomer to navigate the void he leaves behind.
Drawing on years of research into the Rohingya refugee crisis, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s feature directorial debut uses mood and metaphor rather than direct realism to explore displacement, trauma, and the fragile reconstruction of identity. Through a poetic lens, Manta Ray reflects the emotional aftermath of forced migration and the lives shaped by violence and disappearance.
Cinema of migration
Through the Focus: Migrations section, Five Flavours challenges conventional definitions of nationhood and inclusion, while tapping into a broad social cinema trend – using film not just to entertain but to reflect, ask questions, and foster empathy.
From films exploring migration as a familial and intergenerational experience, focusing on memory, cultural roots, and the search for belonging (The Waves Will Carry Us, Elder Son), and those focusing on migration as displacement, loss, or crisis, often tied to social or political marginalisation; to films highlighting the lives, day-to-day realities of migrants, often emphasising labour, precarity, and survival. Both big systematic issues and small gestures that reveal broad migration experiences. The so-called assented cinema and its diaspora perspective prove that any cinematic story of migration would be incomplete without it.
“Through the Focus: Migrations section, Five Flavours challenges conventional definitions of nationhood and inclusion, while tapping into a broad social cinema trend – using film not just to entertain but to reflect, ask questions, and foster empathy.”
Of course, though the section is ambitious, not all filmmakers or films hit the mark equally – as is typical for a line-up this diverse. And while naturally not as “fun” as, e.g., the entertainingly fascinating Japan 80s or Asian Sci-Fi sections, Focus: Migrations is still one of the strongly socially resonant parts of this year’s festival.
It also manages a balance between more difficult or dark stories and more hopeful and reflective ones, while succeeding in stirring empathy, with its personal, not just political stories that show migration’s human dimension. And that’s the most important thing in today’s world, where politicians continue to stir the pot of migration as a hot topic. Five Flavours invites us to see it all through the lens that adds fresh angles and cross-cultural empathy.
Five Flavours Film Festival (Festiwal Filmowy Pięć Smaków) is an annual film festival held in Warsaw, focused on Southeast and East Asian cinema, and which has become one of the most important events of its kind in Europe. The Warsaw edition took place November 12–19, followed by replicas in Poznań, Łódź, Poznań, and Gdańsk (the latter will be November 28–30).
The festival’s online part will last till November 30. Watch all the above films and more here: https://www.piecsmakow.pl/index.do.
