In Promised Sky, Tunisian film director Erige Sehiri unveils the struggles of Ivorian migrants seeking belonging in Tunisia

Erige Sehiri’s third feature, Promised Sky, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as the opening film of the Un Certain Regard competition section, hums with the quiet intensity of lives lived between borders.

Following her lauded debut, Under the Fig Trees (2021), which explored fleeting connections in a rural orchard, Erige now shifts to an urban landscape – the blurred, tense edges of Tunis, as seen through the gazes of Sub-Saharan migrant women, oscillating between faith, trauma, and fractured belonging.

The plot centres on Marie, a dominant Ivorian pastor and former journalist who has reinvented herself as a faith entrepreneur. Having lived in Tunisia for ten years, her status gives her an advantage over those around her and the confidence to exert control. Her home serves as a refuge for Naney, a young mother seeking a better future, and Jolie, a strong-willed student carrying her family’s hopes.

However, the arrival of Kenza, an orphaned girl for whom Maggie develops a deep attachment, challenges their fragile sense of solidarity amid a tense social climate marked by widespread hostility. Together, they must navigate this hostile environment with both vulnerability and resilience.

Erige says, “I always try to make invisible people visible.” Indeed, Promised Sky pulses with the presence of lives too often pushed to the periphery – not just socially, but cinematically.

Parallel worlds 

Set in a Tunisia rarely seen on screen – filtered through the claustrophobic viewpoints of those denied full citizenship – the film avoids the city’s landmarks in favour of liminal spaces: cramped apartments, improvised churches, and makeshift nightclubs.

These aren’t just backdrops; they are social microcosms – “parallel worlds,” as Erige calls them, where survival and solidarity are symbiotic.

Though Promised Sky was conceived long before Tunisia’s recent political crackdowns on migrants, it resonates with that moment.

“Reality caught up with our story,” Erige notes.

Arrests and raids swept the country during production, and the film’s characters move with the wariness of those who know they are being watched.

Yet, Erige resists turning their lives into spectacle or victimhood. Instead, the film asks: How do we live ordinary lives under extraordinary pressure?

Erige’s research-driven process, rooted in years of attending evangelical services and engaging with migrant communities, shapes a film that feels both emotionally intimate and politically urgent.

The character of Kenza, though nearly silent, becomes the film’s spiritual centre. A spectral figure modelled after a real five-year-old who drowned crossing the Mediterranean, she embodies the hope, danger, and dispossession that define these women’s realities. Her presence forces each woman to confront what she has lost and what she is still willing to fight for.

'Look at me!'

One of the film’s most affecting moments occurs when Kenza falls asleep as Marie paints her a vision of the future.

“It was very emotional on set,” Erige says.

She adds, “When something is too hard to hear, we disconnect from reality. I wanted the scene to reflect that.”

This mirrors the opening's silent, delicate, and devastating moment when Maggie learns striking details about Kenza’s arrival in Tunisia – a scene that lingers in the viewer’s mind.

The cast, led by Aïssa Maïga as Marie, delivers performances steeped in lived experience. Laetitia Ky brings defiant grace to Jolie, while Debora Lobe Naney, a non-professional actor, quietly steals the screen.

“She came to me just before she was about to cross the sea,” Erige recalls. “We had to start shooting early just to keep her with us.”

In this instance, cinema quite literally interrupts a crossing. Amid the ensemble cast, a particularly striking figure is Noa, Marie’s blind confidant, played by civil rights activist Touré Blamassi.

“He sees right through her,” Erige says. “He embodies the concept of the Blind Law… He knows what she’s carrying and the danger she’s in.”

His line – “Look at me!” – delivers one of the film’s emotional crescendos, imploring Marie to confront her past and her responsibility toward Kenza.

A world of soft shadows and blurred edges

The film’s visual language is shaped by Erige’s collaboration with cinematographer Frida Marzouk, known for her work on Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013, dir. Abdellatif Kechiche) and Bye Bye Tiberiade (2023, dir. Lina Soualem).

Together, they construct a world of soft shadows and blurred edges, eschewing clear geography in favour of psychological terrain. The city is glimpsed only obliquely – hazy, inaccessible, a place that exists around the characters but not for them.

Alongside Aisha Can’t Fly Away by Morad Mostafa, which was also presented in the Un Certain Regard section and centred on the hardships of a Sudanese migrant worker in Cairo, Promised Sky signals a new direction in contemporary North African cinema.

This emerging trend shifts the focus away from portraying local people solely as victims of social inequality and post-colonial discrimination, both abroad and at home, and instead examines how locals treat foreigners.

“I’m frustrated,” Erige admits. “We Tunisians have a diaspora all over the world. And yet, we struggle to welcome others. As if we weren’t all Africans.”

Promised Sky is, in part, a rebuke to that hypocrisy.

The film closes with a song – “They promised me heaven, but meanwhile I’m on earth, struggling” – from the band Delgres, whose lyrics inspired the film’s French title, Promis le Ciel.

This line encapsulates the central tension of the film: the unkept promises of governments, religion, and freedom itself.

Mariana Hristova is a freelance film critic, cultural journalist, and programmer. She contributes to national and international outlets and has curated programs for Filmoteca De Catalunya, Arxiu Xcèntric, goEast Wiesbaden, etc. Her professional interests include cinema from the European peripheries and archival and amateur films