"Don’t let anyone here tell you you’re nothing. Every day is a battle." Living thousands of kilometres from home is never easy, regardless of the circumstances, goals, dreams or dramas which have taken you there, and especially when the country you’re inhabiting isn’t interested in integrating you and even tries to ostracise or reject you, as is currently a very common occurrence all over the world. But in the midst of these difficulties there’s often solidarity, a heightened sense of community, faith in the miraculous power of perseverance  - in the hope that it might one day pay off - and, above all, lots of winging it on a day-to-day basis. It’s this vast subject-area, and the many questions which arise from it, that Tunisian director Erige Sehiri tackles with copious empathy and human warmth in the highly feminist and incredibly generous film Promised Sky [+leggi anche:
intervista: Erige Sehiri
scheda film], which opened the Un Certain Regard section of the 78th Cannes Film Festival.

"Everything’s broken." Like good maternal fairies, three sub-Saharan women living as emigrants and sharing a house in Tunis exchange knowing looks as they lean over a little girl (Estelle Kenza Dogbo) of unknown identity who’s survived a shady and traumatising shipwreck. The first of the three, pastor Marie (a remarkable Aïssa Maïga), has set up her Church of Perseverance here, an underground Catholic cult which also carries out charity work. The second, Naney (acting revelation Déborah Christelle Naney), helps Marie in her work, whilst secretly involving herself in various trafficking operations with her Tunisian partner-in-crime Foued (Foued Zaazaa), with the sole aim of bringing her teenage daughter - whom she left behind in Ivory Coast (and whom she hasn’t seen for three years, other than on Facetime) - to Tunis before travelling on to Europe. The third, Jolie (Laetitia Ky, previously acclaimed in Night of the Kings [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Philippe Lacôte
scheda film] and Disco Boy [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Giacomo Abbruzzese
scheda film]), is an engineering student whose identity papers are in order, unlike her two friends (one is waiting for her residence permit to be renewed, the other is here illegally). Each of them has their own character and life experience, but harmony reigns between them because "women are taking the initiative in 2024", despite the fact they’re forced to find solutions to their many small problems every single day of their lives. But the local mood is tense, and things take a turn for the worse when the authorities ramp up their "pursuit of sub-Saharans"…

Wonderfully paced and endowed with an incredibly fluid sense of movement and varied décor, Promised Sky slowly and skilfully lifts the veil on the different sides of its three protagonists, each of whom develop their own growing awareness of a global situation in all its minor details, a situation which has consequences for the individual and whose urgency and stakes are understood perfectly by the audience. With this second fiction feature film (after Under the Fig Trees [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Erige Sehiri
scheda film], which was discovered in the 2022 Directors’ Fortnight), Erige Sehiri clearly passes a qualitative corner in her cinematographic journey, which was previously dominated by the documentary form. She manages to maintain an ideal, dynamic and incredibly authentic balance between touching humanism - which doesn’t slide into excessive sentimentalism - and the echoes of a political message steeped in seriousness yet unhindered by heaviness, all through the prism a very particular microcosm and three heroines who must learn to adapt their capacity to push beyond their limits in a sometimes cruel world of laws and regulations.

Promised Sky was produced by French firm Maneki Films with Tunisia’s Henia Production. Luxbox are steering international sales.