Transit + The Exilic Legacy of Hannah Arendt
Fri 28 NovGeorg, a German refugee, is trying to escape present-day occupied France. As the days pass, other refugees around him are captured or killed. His hopes lie on a passage to Mexico he managed to get tickets for – but the wait seems interminable.
Petzold’s film is notable for its refusal to clearly distinguish between past and present, underscoring the persistent nature of migration and the enduring challenges faced by refugees. His film is based on the novel of the same name by Anna Seghers, a Jewish author whose own experience of fleeing the Nazis via Paris and Marseille deeply informs the story. Like thousands of other refugees, Seghers struggled to obtain the necessary documents to leave Europe and find a country willing to accept her and her family—in her case, Mexico.
Free beers for tickets holders prior to the screening (while stocks last)
Post-Screening Discussion
To mark 50 years since the death of Hannah Arendt, the film will be followed by a panel discussion with Jo-Anne Dillabough and Irit Katz from the Hannah Arendt Consortium (University of Cambridge) and Zoe Roth (Durham University) on the ongoing significance of Arendt’s work to contemporary issues of migration, specifically her ideas on statelessness, liminality, exile, and totalitarianism. The conversation will be chaired by Laura Stahnke, co-director of Migration Collective & London Migration Film Festival.
About the speakers
Jo-Anne Dillabough
Jo-Anne Dillabough is Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge and Director of Studies (Sociology) at Homerton College. Her research explores the relationships between rising populism and the exilic condition in modernity, attending to how political displacement, war, and deepening social divisions reshape contemporary educational and civic worlds. A longstanding scholar of Hannah Arendt’s work, she directs the Cambridge Hannah Arendt Consortium on Crisis and Political Transformation. Her current scholarship spans history and memory studies, the sociology of exile, counter-archival approaches to activism and aesthetics, and the poetics of youthful resistance to authoritarian and populist imaginaries. She is Principal Investigator of the ESRC project University in Crisis, a comparative investigation into the effects of populist and authoritarian governance on universities in Hungary, the UK, South Africa, and Turkey. She is also co-editing, with E. Buckner, Academic Freedom in Turbulent Times, which interrogates contemporary struggles over knowledge, dissent, and political freedom, and reconsiders the role of the public intellectual in an age marked by new extremes.
Irit Katz
Irit Katz is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, Fellow of Christ's College, and the Academic Director of the Cambridge Hannah Arendt Consortium on Crisis and Political Transformation. Her work focuses on built environments shaped in extreme conditions, including spaces of forced migration, conflict, and environmental changes, in historic and contemporary contexts. Her research has won numerous recognitions, including the RIBA President’s Award for Research and the John Urry Mobilities Prize. Her latest book is The Common Camp: Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel-Palestine (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
Zoë Roth
Zoë Roth is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Durham University. Her research and writing mainly concerns two things: bodies and Jews. She is currently working on a book about how fascism and authoritarianism numb our senses.
The London Migration Film Festival, which is holding its 10th annual edition from 27 November-3 December 2025, aims to challenge the narrow rhetoric on migration that often sees migration, and people on the move, framed in reductive and dehumanising binaries.
In collaboration with Goethe-Institut London
