Experiencing Interruptions?

When the Water Horse Seeks a New Home

An animal figurine made of plastic remains on an abandoned boat once used by Rohingya refugees, washed ashore on a remote beach in Aceh, Indonesia, nearly two thousand kilometers from its place of origin. This figurine, a small remnant of an uncertain journey, serves as a silent trace of human movement, loss, and resilience.
This film traces the path of the object across the oceans and its borders, in search of iits owner, and of the human story behind the displacement it represents.

  • Andrianus Oetjoe
    Director
  • Muhammad Sufaid
    Key Cast
  • Sarbini
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Short
  • Genres:
    Creative Documentary
  • Runtime:
    26 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    January 15, 2026
  • Country of Origin:
    Indonesia
  • Country of Filming:
    Indonesia
  • Language:
    Indonesian, Rohingya
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Andrianus Oetjoe

Andrianus Oetjoe is a filmmaker from Jakarta. He was the recipient of a documentary film scholarship from the Goethe-Institut Indonesien in 2017 and the Robert Bosch Stiftung in 2019. His films explore themes of minority and marginalized groups as well as issues of social exclusion and racism in Indonesia. Among his works are TRANSIT (2014), which addresses the criminalization of asylum seekers in Jakarta; RESPITE (2018), which portrays the friendship between refugees and local residents in Makassar; and DER GRENZGÄNGER (2018), which depicts a refugee emergency shelter in the small German village of Sumte. He is currently completing an MFA at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

The theme of homelessness and displacement has deeply influenced my own family history in Jakarta, which has Chinese minority ancestry. My parents survived four 'Chinese pogroms' from 1938 during Dutch colonial times to the last anti-communist measure in 1966 and the fall of Suharto's military dictatorship in 1998. Therefore, with this work, I would like to show Indonesian viewers and wider audiences a differentiated representation of Rohingya refugees and Acehnese which could hopefully evoke more empathy and human solidarity.