For its 78th edition, the Cannes Film Festival has chosen an Arab film to open the A certain look section: Promised the sky (promised Sky) of Erige Sehiri. A strong gesture, both political and cinematographic, which sets the tone for a section often perceived as the sensitive laboratory of the official selection. The film will be screened at the opening on Wednesday May 14 at 7 p.m., just after the inaugural ceremony. This return of the Franco-Tunisian filmmaker to Cannes, two years after her revelation in the Directors’ fortnight, consecrates a singular voice of contemporary Arab cinema.
A filmmaker rooted in reality
Erige Sehiri had already pointed out with Under the figs (Under the Fig Trees), his first fictional feature, selected at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2022Then chosen as representative of Tunisia at Oscars 2023. The film, shot with non-professional, bathed in a soft light and a rare attention to rural youth, its gestures, its desires and its silences. He had conquered the criticism by his accuracy, his counting and his way of bringing the romantic of banality.
But before this entry into fiction, Erige Sehiri had built a solid career in the documentary. She signs first My father’s facebook (2012), personal and ironic short film on the way generations are confronted with technology. Then The normal route (2018), a long documentary devoted to the closure of the Tunisian railway line Tunis – Kasserine, through the gaze of a train driver. This film, presented in particular with visions of reality and at the Fidba, reveals a filmmaker capable of combining social acuity with great sweetness in the gaze on his characters. These first works, at the crossroads of journalism, intimate and social chronicle, already announced the human tensions which nourished his work.
In parallel with his cinematographic projects, Erige Sehiri co -founded the Inkyfada investigation platform as well as the Tunisian NGO Al Khatt, committed to press freedom. She is also a founding member of the collective Rawiyat – Sisters in Film, who supports Arab directors and from diasporas. This civic course, this constant immersion in invisible stories, irrigate all its artistic practice.
A story of women, migration and solidarity
With Promised the skyErige Sehiri continues its exploration of the female trajectories taken in the nets of reality, this time through the migratory and social tensions that cross contemporary Tunisia. The film tells the story of Marie, a former journalist who has become a pastor, from Côte d’Ivoire, who lives in Tunis and welcomes women in search of a refuge. Among them: Naney, a young mother ready to do anything to offer a better life to her child, and pretty, a combative student on which all the hope of her family rests. The arrival of an orphan little girl will test the fragile ties that unite this improvised home.
Without ever pouring into miserabilism or archetypes of the “film on topic”, Erige Sehiri describes a closed angle of exile and sorority, where tensions, hopes, anger and wounds reveal. “” What interests me is to go beyond the migrant’s archetype to build real, complex, unexpected characters, capable of destabilizing the spectator She explains in the official press release.
This will manifests itself in particular in the choice of actresses: Aïssa Maïga embodies Marie with a gravity crossed by maternal impulses and painful silences. By her side, Laetitia Ky, Ivorian artist and activist, lends her passion to Jolie, while Deborah Naney composes a character of modest and resolved mother. Tunisian Mohamed Grayaa completes the distribution, in a secondary but marking role. The presence of such an international cast, bringing together figures from sub -Saharan Africa and the Maghreb, underlines the transnational nature of the story.
A sober and inhabited staging
As in Under the figsthe staging of Erige Sehiri favors gestures, looks, underground tensions. The film is again photographed by Frida Marzouk, director of Franco-Tunisian photography, already at work on her first feature film. Marzouk, who also worked as a camera assistant on films John Wickknows how to capture the faces in the dark, the light bursts that pierce a closed room, the intimate movements of a barely recomposed daily life.
The camera is held as close as possible to the bodies, but never in intrusion: it observes, accompanies, testifies. Erige Sehiri seeks neither the effect nor the demonstration. It lets human complexity happen, with a salutary slowness, in an urban Tunisia rarely shown – neither postcard, nor chaos, but a place of passage, of recomposition, of hidden social tension.
Expanded production and diffusion
Promised the sky is co-produced by Erige Sehiri herself and producer Didar Domehri (Maneki Films), known for her commitment to author’s cinemas, especially in the French-speaking and Latin American world. The film is distributed in the Arab world by Mad Distribution, a key actor in the dissemination of independent cinema in the MENA region. This structure ensures regional visibility at work, including in Arab and African festivals where Erige Sehiri is expected as a now essential voice.
The film also benefits from solid international support, with European partners sensitive to migratory challenges and stories from the Global South. It is this articulation between local anchoring (Tunisia today, sub -Saharan Africa in its human flows) and universal worn that makes Promised the sky particularly impactful.
An opening gesture for Cannes
The opening of a certain look by Promised the sky Constitutes a highlight of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Not only because it is a film directed by an Arab woman – which is still too rare in the official sections – but also because the film carries a political word to the height of human. In 2025, there were only 7 directors in competition out of 21, and 18 women out of the 69 filmmakers in the official selection, or 26.1 %, against 33 % in 2023. No director of director is present in midnight sessions or in Cannes Premier. The highlighting of Erige Sehiri’s work in a section as strategic as it therefore takes on a major symbolic value.
Especially since this film arrives at a time when questions of migration, racism and hospitality are at the heart of European and Mediterranean fractures. By giving them a feminine, intimate, warm face, and tearing them away from slogans and statistics, Promised the sky offers another way to look at the world. A slower, more attentive, more human way.
Neïla Driss
