تَناثُر البحر / Scattered Sea, 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 – Morocco ~
30th Rabat International Author Film Festival (FICAR), Rabat, MA, NOV 2025
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.”
Quote of Jury declaration Jury for the Court-Métrage short film competition: 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.
~ BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM – Portugal ~
9th Porto Femme Int. Film Festival, Student Section, Porto, PT, APR 2026
A striking meditation on connection across borders, this experimental film navigates the echoes of historical trauma and a fractured present, while also celebrating the differences and proximities that unite us. [T]he film becomes a profound reflection on interculturality—a victory of diverse voices over singular perspectives. With the Mediterranean Sea as a powerful, unifying backdrop, this work challenges the dominance of a westernized worldview and affirms the creative force of collective storytelling.
Quote of Jury Declaration Jury: António Morais, Rosebel Kagimure and Ana Grgic.
~ HONOURABLE MENTION – SIGNS AWARD – France ~
Festival international Signes de Nuit, Paris, FR, DEC 2025
The jury praises a film that invents a hybrid cinematic language to materialize multicultural thought. By blending documentary, magical realism, and performance, the film constructs visual spaces where the artists’ symbolic gestures—shaping sand, inhabiting ruins—literally transform the frame. The use of contemplative wide shots, integrated visual effects, and a dreamlike aesthetic creates “hybrid zones” where geographical and historical boundaries dissolve. This fluid and inventive form, which rejects any linear narrative, makes cinema itself a space for collective creation, opening up, through image and gesture, a field of possibilities for reinventing imaginations and connections beyond the fractures of the world.
Quote of Jury Declaration The Signs Award honors films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way.
~ BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY – Spain ~
6th Festival Int. de Cine Independiente de Madrid (FICIMAD) (Student section), Madrid, SP, JUN 2026
Through stunning imagery and a deeply poetic visual language, Katja Rivas Pinzon transforms Scattered Sea into a powerful cinematic experience. [H]er cinematography captures landscapes, bodies, and gestures with extraordinary sensitivity […]. The jury was particularly impressed by the film’s ability to blend documentary, performance, and magical realism into a coherent and visually captivating work. Every frame contributes to an atmosphere of reflection and discovery, where the Mediterranean becomes both a physical space and a metaphor […]. Together, Lia Sáile and Katja Rivas Pinzon have created a visually striking film that demonstrates how cinematography can become a language of its own-one capable of expressing complexity, emotion, and hope beyond words.“
Quote of Jury Declaration FICIMAD 2026.
~ BEST VIDEO ART – Venezuela ~
10th Maracay International Film & Video Festival, Maracay, VE, Jun 2026
