In recent years, the Tokyo International Film Festival has transformed itself into one of Asia’s most cosmopolitan showcases of global cinema. Once known primarily for auteurist Japanese works, its 38th edition, which closed Wednesday, featured films that underscore the ways migration is both a lived experience and a moral inquiry.

Five films in particular — “Mother Bhumi,” “Lost Land,” “April,” “The Blue Trail” and “Little Amelie or the Character of Rain” — feature migration narratives that stretch from Southeast Asia to South America, and from documentary realism to mythic animation. Each engages with the porousness of borders and the inner yearnings of belonging, but together they sketch out something larger: a cinematic cartography of rootlessness that feels uniquely urgent in the modern age.

In “Mother Bhumi,” Malaysian director Chong Keat Aun returns to the paddy fields of his childhood on the border between Malaysia and Thailand. Set in the late 1990s during a period of social unrest, the film follows Hong Im, a widowed farmer and ritual healer who becomes entangled in land disputes and supernatural hauntings. The story unfolds in a multiethnic rice-farming community where Chinese, Thai and Malay lineages intertwine, and where the earth itself — scarred by vestiges of colonial treaties — seems to carry the memory of dispossession.