A moment of peculiar poignancy opens Erige Sehiri’s sensitive, if somewhat unremarkable, Promised Sky. A young girl is being bathed by three women as she relates a story — the true story of a sea journey she took. They ask her simple, innocent questions, and she provides simple, startling responses, almost nonchalantly describing a scene of violence and peril. The truth becomes rapidly apparent — the girl is a refugee, now separated from her family, and the women now her unofficial caretakers. Related are harrowing moments from the recent past, adding bitterness to a sweet moment in the present.
Difficulty abounds throughout this film, though Sehiri’s approach is never morose. Promised Sky is a surprisingly light, accessible, optimistic film, sourcing hope from despair, and never artificially so. The three women, pastor Marie (Aïssa Maïga), student Jolie (Laëtitia Ky), and undocumented Naney (Debora Lobe Naney), are Ivorians living in Tunisia, struggling to build better lives for themselves in a country growing increasingly hostile to Sub-Saharan migrants. Their struggles are born from necessity and, though the strain they feel shows few, if any, signs of abating, it’s the same necessity that drives all of us — the hope of better times ahead. Marie finds it in faith, Jolie in persisting with her studies, and Naney in the likely futile promise that she may strike it big (or big enough for now) with one of her small-time illegal schemes.
Sehiri finds hope in reality, in the understanding that even the most arduous lives are often spent, day to day, striving for positive change. She thus focuses on verisimilitude over dramatic urgency, a sacrifice that engenders a lack of momentum, but she orchestrates it well. With an excellent cast that universally avoids the temptation to yield to the potentially melodramatic narrative elements, she crafts believable moments, naturally fluid conversations with authentic delivery. It’s a fundamentally nuanced film, one that calibrates a fine, naturalistic balance between light and dark, comedy and tragedy, perceptive to the limitless implications in and interpretations of any detail that’s rooted in reality. A word here or a glance there may carry a very specific dramatic intent in a more calculated story; in Promised Sky, where these details are designed only to reflect real, complex stories, the intent is infinitely multifaceted.
Yet there is dramatic construction here and, believable though this film may be from moment to moment, it’s too rudimentary to allow Sehiri’s smart, sympathetic work to shine as it should. The three protagonists are three very distinct types, and their identity as such feels like schematic representation. Their arcs too, while undoubtedly reflective of the experience of many women like them, follow familiar lines that give the film overall a sense of inevitability, even if it’s executed with sincerity and compassion. If it would do these stories a disservice to furnish them with some element of surprise, the film’s lack of an original approach formally, stylistically, and narratively renders it mundane, which may be an equal disservice.
But the sensitivity and sympathy exhibited by Sehiri are admirable, and her method of doing so, in collaboration with fellow screenwriters Anna Ciennik and Malika Cécile Louati, is intelligent. She doesn’t condense incident and emotion, shoehorning it into staged set pieces, but rather develops it gradually and organically. And she’s wholly non-judgemental, even toward characters whose presence may appear only to be antagonistic. Features such as these elevate Promised Sky above the status of the average issue movie, and provide the actors with strong material with which to craft fully-rounded characters. This film may not appear outwardly ambitious, but it’s full of beautiful, perceptive work that makes for a rewarding watch nonetheless.
Published as part of LFF 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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