Erige Sehiri’s Promised Sky has debuted a first official trailer ahead of its world premiere in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard category. Paris-based company Luxbox dropped the first look via their YouTube account on Friday, May 10th. Luxbox is also in charge of handling world sales with French distribution by Jour2Fête.
This is not the first time the French-Tunisian director has had a project premiere at Cannes, as in 2022 her last film, Under the Fig Trees, was screened at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and went on to be chosen to represent Tunisia at the 2023 Oscars. With the screenplay written by Sehiri, Anna Ciennik and Malika Cécile Louati, Promised Sky centers around Marie, an Ivorian former journalist turned pastor, who has resided in Tunisia for ten years. Her house becomes a place of comfort for a young mother named Naney, who is “seeking a better future,” and a woman named Jolie, described as “a strong-willed student carrying her family’s hopes.” But when an orphan girl arrives, it seemingly “challenges their sense of solidarity” within the strained social climate that reveals the woman’s “fragility and strength.”
Sehiri voiced her opinions on the strained relationship between the Tunisians and migrants from other places in Africa, commenting, “As a Tunisian woman myself, I’m deeply frustrated to see that we can’t welcome migrants with dignity, even though we’re from a country with such a wide diaspora ourselves. We act as if all of us weren’t living on the same continent, as if all of us weren’t Africans.” Sehiri, at first, was not planning on documenting the political climate in Tunisia, but, “over time, the movie began to mirror the political situation of the country.” Sehiri continued to explain, “With mass arrests and raids taking place all around Tunisia, we began to ask ourselves, how can we breathe these tensions into our story without turning our characters into outdated, reductive stereotypes? We were trying to have some perspective on what was happening to avoid any unnecessary violence on screen. We wanted to see these women live their lives, in spite of everything.”
The ensemble cast features Aïssa Maiga, Debora Lobe Naney, Laetitia Ky, Estelle Kenza Dogbo, Foued Zaazaa, Mohamed Grayaa, and Touré Blamassi. The film was made in collaboration with Mad Solutions and Pathé Touch Afrique, with producers including Sehiri for Henia Production and Didar Domehri for Maneki Films, along with Canal+ being named as co-producer.
Check out the trailer below:
Leave a Comment