“Rohingya” is a continuation of Ai Weiwei’s previous films Human Flow (2017) and The Rest (2019) which spotlight the plight of refugees. The feature-length documentary focuses on Rohingya refugees who were forced out of Myanmar in August 2017. The Rohingya are an ethnic Muslim minority from Myanmar’s Rakhine State who have suffered several decades of persecution by the Burmese government. Following widespread ethnic cleansing by the Burmese army, they fled to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, which have become the world’s largest refugee camp of our time and accommodate nearly 900,000 refugees now.
Filmed over several months in Cox’s Bazar, “Rohingya” records the community’s everyday life, social rituals, the camp’s unique landscapes, and the light of humanity amid one of the greatest displacements of our time.