Scattered Sea

Moving between magical realism, performance and documentary, 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.