CRS Film Screening: When the water horse seeks a new home

September 24, 2026

1:00pm - 2:30pm

Location: HNES 140 (note: this is an in person event only), Keele campus

Guest Speaker: Antje Missbach, Professor of Sociology at Bielefeld University

This film is part of a project on Theorising (im)mobilities at sea: Challenging the terra firma bias in Refugee Studies through human maritime movements.

Filmmaker: Andrianus Merdhi

Academic leads and producers: Gerhard Hoffstaedter and Antje Missbach 

Maritime refugees remain largely invisible in public discourse, reduced to statistics or crisis headlines. This documentary restores their voices and humanity. The film follows a small plastic animal figurine found on an abandoned Rohingya refugee boat washed ashore on a beach in Aceh, Indonesia, nearly two thousand kilometres from where the journey began. Through this object, the film traces the human story of displacement, loss, and resilience behind Rohingya maritime crossings of the Andaman Sea. It uses Acehnese and Rohingya lay actors to imaginatively reconstruct pivotal experiences before and after their arrival, creating a space between testimony and creative storytelling.

Bios

Andrianus “Oetjoe” Merdhi is a self-taught filmmaker from Jakarta. He was awarded documentary film scholarships by the Goethe-Institute in 2017 and the Robert Bosch Stiftung in 2019. Most of his films explore themes related to marginalized groups, social exclusion and racism in Indonesia. His work, Kayu Besi (2022), a film about the forests and Indigenous communities of West Papua, was screened at DOK Leipzig, and The Sole of the Flying Heron (2024), about a mystical Islamic minority group in Java, was shown at the Tokyo Documentary Film Festival (TDFF). He is currently pursuing an M.F.A. at HFBK Hamburg.

Gerhard Hoffstaedter is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Anthropology Major Convenor in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland. His research spans refugee politics, Muslim identity, and forced migration in Southeast Asia, with particular focus in Malaysia and the broader Malay world. He is a former Lee Kong Chian NUS–Stanford Fellow and Australian Research Council DECRA recipient. His monograph Modern Muslim Identities: Negotiating Religion and Ethnicity in Malaysia (NIAS Press, 2011) examined the intersections of religious identity and state governance in Malaysia, and his forthcoming book with Stanford University Press is an ethnography of the Rohingya and Chin refugee experience in Malaysia. He has published widely in journals including the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Citizenship Studies, and contributes public-facing analysis to outlets including The Diplomat and the Lowy Institute. He co-directs the Volkswagen Foundation–funded Maritime Refugee Lab.

Antje Missbach is Professor of Sociology at Bielefeld University, specialising in the study of migration and forced displacement in the Asia-Pacific region. Next to pre- and postdoctoral appointments at Humboldt University, Heidelberg University and Monash University (Melbourne), she was a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Melbourne Law School (2011-2014). In 2013, she was awarded an Australian Research Council Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA, 2014-2017). In 2017, she received the William J. Holland Prize and the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellowship. She is the author of Troubled transit: asylum seekers stuck in Indonesia (ISEAS Yusof Publishing, 2015) and The Criminalisation of People Smuggling in Indonesia and Australia: Asylum out of reach (Routledge, 2022); co-author of Indonesia: State and Society in Transition (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020) and co-editor of Refugee Protection in Southeast Asia: Between Humanitarianism and Sovereignty (Berghahn, 2024). Together with Gerhard Hoffstaedter, she has initiated the Maritime Refugee Lab, a multi-disciplinary network of scholars for theorising (im)mobilities at sea.