Megumi Lim is a Singaporean/Japanese documentary filmmaker based in Kyiv, Ukraine.
She makes films that explores how people’s relationship to home are reshaped by forces beyond their control.
Her graduation thesis and student short documentary (2016) focused on the residents of Yubari, Japan, capturing the loss of their beloved public baths – and with them a vital sense of community – following the coal mining town’s bankruptcy and the government policies that ensued.
In 2019 Hong Kong, she made a short doc about the mass arrests of anti-government protesters that took place across the city, and the scars and trauma they left behind in ordinary places.
Her most recent short film Night Shift (2025) turns to Kharkiv, Ukraine. Shot during the hours of curfew, it explores how war has transformed the rhythms of night through the experiences of night-shift workers. The film has competed in numerous film festivals around the world, including the Kyiv International Short Film Festival (2025), the Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin (2025), the SCANORAMA European Film Festival (2025), E Tudo Verdade Film Festival (2026), and Sole Luna Doc Film Festival (2026) among others. It won the Audience Award at the Kyiv International Short Film Festival, and the Best Short Film Award at the Sole Luna Doc Film Festival (2026).
Her next film and her first feature-length documentary, Inochi, follows a Japanese music duo and couple Heavenphetamine (Hiroki and Sara) as they tour Ukraine during the coldest and darkest winter of Russia’s full-scale war, only by public transport. They left behind their home in Japan to become musicians on the road. Through them we journey through cultural and creative spaces that have continued to thrive in Ukraine despite more than four years of Russia’s invasion.
She is also working on a long-term project which follows a family living in one of the most dangerous districts in Kyiv that has come under frequent missile and drone attacks. Through their apartment window – which has shattered multiple times due to blast waves – they have witnessed how war has damaged, destroyed, and reshaped their neighborhood. She weaves their story into the tapestry of the place’s rich history and enduring community.
Megumi began her career in 2015 covering news as a video journalist at the Reuters bureau in Tokyo. For almost a decade – based in Tokyo and then as a freelancer in Beijing – she reported on news stories across Asia. Her work has been featured in Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, ZDF, ITV News, The Straits Times, Channel News Asia, and others. She was part of the ZDF team that received the Hanns Joachim Friedrich’s Prize for their reporting of the historic 2019 Hong Kong protests and zero-Covid China. She moved to Ukraine in 2023, and transitioned from news to documentary film.
She has a degree in Oil Painting from Tama Art University, and a masters degree in Journalism from Waseda University.
She speaks English, Japanese, a little bit of Mandarin, and is now learning Ukrainian.
(Profile photo by Yu Shin Tsao)