Experimental film, 2K, color, 5.1 dolby surround, 13’37”, MA/MT/DE
Trailer ‘Scattered Sea’, 2025
Moving between magical realism, performance and documentary, the experimental film Scattered Sea is an exploration of how people can connect with each other across borders in a multi-relationally diverse world with its cracks of entangled historical traumas, a fractured present, power imbalances and a deep longing for belonging.
17 performers from North Africa and Europe interact and relate to each other, creating hybrid spaces, intertwining, seeking closeness. The film was shot across Morocco, Malta, and Germany. This geopolitical triangle reflects layered colonial legacies and contemporary frictions between Europe and the MENA region. Through minimal gestures the performers inscribe and unsettle space. Moments of proximity and distance unfold; ruins, gardens, and streets are roamed, each path seemingly returning toward the sea. Symbols are traced and deconstructed, pomegranates dissected as a river overflows on ornamental tiles, invading interior space. The search for remnants transforms into an act of scattering traces — daring fragile beginnings.
Embedding theories by philosophers such as Édouard Glissant’s ‘opacité’, honouring the unknown and unknowable, and Hannah Arendt’s ‘natality’, the potential within every beginning to open unforeseen paths, cultural memory, decolonial inquiry, and historiographic critique converge. Counter-narratives resist linear temporality and binary world orders, proposing instead a poetics of multiplicity and renewal. A space opens for social and aesthetic imaginaries attuned to plural futures, as amid twilight a new island is built between continents on the sea.
Award Winner
BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM
30th Rabat International Author Film Festival (FICAR), Rabat, MA, November 2025
Jury statement Rabat Int. Author Film Festival
تمنح جائزة احسن فيلم تجريبي تكريما للجرأة الإبداعية و البحث الجمالي في لغة الصوت و الصورة متجاوزا القوالب التقليدية للسرد السينمائي ليخلق عالما بصريا و فكريا جديدا مليء بالإثارة و الخيال والفلسفة و التجريب التقني
“The award for Best Experimental Film [for Scattered Sea] is granted in recognition of creative boldness and aesthetic research in the language of sound and image, pushing beyond traditional narrative forms to create a new visual and intellectual universe filled with excitement, imagination, philosophy, and technical experimentation.”
The jury for the Court-Métrage short film competition at the Festival du Cinéma d’Auteur de Rabat consisted of Egyptian filmmaker Azza Elhosseiny, co-founder of the Luxor African Film Festival, Moroccan actress Bouchra Ahrich, and Ahmed bin Amer Al-Hadri, director and screenwriter of documentary films.
