From a Mirrorless Cell

Episode #515: Toru Kubota is a Japanese documentary filmmaker who believes storytelling can foster empathy beyond abstract argument. A political science student at Keio University who developed an interest in refugee issues, in 2014 he joined a student project interviewing Rohingya refugees in Japan. Using a camera for the first time, he helped produce a short documentary about their lives.

In 2016, Kubota traveled to Sittwe in Rakhine State and entered camps housing Rohingya displaced after the 2012 violence. Though officially designated as internally displaced persons camps, he saw them as places of confinement, where communities were segregated and deprived of adequate services. Filming an accidental fire inside one camp became a turning point; editing the footage later convinced him of film’s power to convey lived experience.

Following both the military’s 2017 campaign against the Rohingya and the 2021 coup, Kubota returned each time to Myanmar to document events unfolding there. While filming a protest in 2022,soldiers arrested him at gunpoint and used staged photographs as evidence of his participation. He was charged with incitement and immigration violations and sentenced to ten years in prison. Fortunately, diplomatic pressure was able to secure his release after 111 days in detention at the notorious Insein Prison, where he had endured solitary confinement and struggled with despair.

Since then, Kubota has supported exiled Myanmar journalists in a variety of different ways. His film “Borderline Resistors” follows exile media collectives along the Thai–Myanmar border. Reflecting on his imprisonment and the fragility of civil liberties, he recalls something an activist once told him: “Freedom is like air. You never appreciate it when you can breathe freely. But you finally realize how important is when you get drowned in water.”