SUNDANCE 2025 World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Amel Guellaty • Director of Where the Wind Comes From
“Road movies mostly use handheld cameras and natural light, but I wanted to go somewhere else that takes on the rules of the imagination”
by Olivia Popp
- The Tunisian writer-director talks about blending the road-movie format with a free-spirited coming-of-age tale set across different parts of the country

Through desert and small towns, from stealing a pickup truck to screaming into the sky: the two young protagonists in Amel Guellaty’s first feature, Where the Wind Comes From [+see also:
film review
interview: Amel Guellaty
film profile], take us on a journey across Tunisia. The film has just had its world premiere in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Cineuropa spoke to Guellaty to explore her depiction of the country in all its complexity, the symbolic cinematographic choices and how she found her two lead actors.
Cineuropa: The two lead characters are very distinct: a teenage girl who’s expressive and strong-willed, Alyssa, and an introspective young man, Mehdi. Did you always have this dynamic in mind?
Amel Guellaty: The character of Alyssa is kind of the same character in all of my movies. I did two shorts: in the first one, the character was 17, and in the second, she was ten. I always love writing this kind of character – a strong, bold, fearless girl who also has a lot of insecurities. I also wanted to write sensitive and introverted men. It was important for me to write an Arab film where the characters wouldn’t look like the clichés of Arab women and men. Alyssa is not an oppressed woman. She is not fighting for her freedom – well, she is fighting for her freedom, but not against religion or [conservative] society. She looks like any other teenager in the world. It was important for me not to create the masculine, macho Arab man that is an oppressor. In Tunisia, women have strong personalities, and it's well known that Tunisia is the most open-minded Arab country – for example, it's legal to have an abortion there.
This more socially progressive environment that you speak about is explored further when the two characters reach wealthier spaces, like the scene where they let loose in a club. Why was this moment important for you to include?
Tunisia is a complex country, but there are a lot of opposites. I see Tunisia as a character in my movie, so I wanted to show all of the facets of the country. You have a really open-minded Tunisia, but you also have a Tunisia that is deeply rooted in Muslim and Arab tradition, and they all coexist together. There is a huge gap between the rich and the rest of the country – not only in terms of money, like in every country, but there’s also a huge difference in culture. Most of the time, the richest person in Tunisia is going to speak French more than Arabic. They're going to be way more rooted in Western tradition.
You use strong colour blocking for the characters – Alyssa always wears red and Mehdi wears blue. Can you talk about the symbolic choices such as this one?
From the beginning, my idea was to never put them in different shots. Until they fight in the desert, they are always together in the same shot. I studied a lot of Almodóvar movies and Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou. I am fascinated by and passionate about image, as a photographer but also as a director. The image should speak for me. Most of the time, road movies use handheld cameras and natural light, but I wanted to go somewhere else that takes on the rules of the imagination and another kind of cinematography.
I saw that this is the first big film role for Eya Bellagha, who plays Alyssa – she has such great chemistry with Slim Baccar, who plays Mehdi. Can you talk about the casting process?
It's her first feature. I met Eya on my first short film in 2017, when she was just 17, and she was a Thai boxing champion in Tunisia. I needed a stunt for a character in Black Mamba. I loved her at that time – I felt her face was so interesting, and she had so much energy. Ten years later, I had her in mind, so I called her in for the casting. I even did some mood boards for the movie to find money, and I chose her as a model already, although I didn't know how she would act. But ever since the first audition, I was like, “Okay, it's her.” As for Slim, I didn't know him before. It took me a long time to find him, and I auditioned many people in Tunisia because I knew that for this movie, the casting was really important. They were going to be in every scene, so I needed to find the perfect actors. When I found Slim and I put him next to Eya, it was clear that it worked really well because they started having fun together. It was important to find two great actors who really had synergy and shared something.
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