Promised Sky

That’s the question posed by Promised Sky’s opening scene, in which three women gently ask a little girl named Kenza questions like “What’s your family name?” and “When you were in the boat, who was with you?” Her answers don’t shed much light on the situation, but by the end of their conversation it’s clear that Kenza is the sole survivor of a shipwreck carrying refugees to Tunisia. Co-writer/director Erige Sehiri is as sensitive in her filmmaking as those three women — de facto matriarch Marie (Aïssa Maïga), displaced mother Naney (Debora Lobe Naney), and student Jolie (Laetitia Ky) — are in their questioning, which shifts seamlessly to caregiving once they realize they have no choice but to watch over the orphan who’s just washed ashore — at least for the time being.

‍

It takes a village indeed, especially when everyone living in it knows what it’s like to be an outsider. A journalist-turned-pastor originally from the Ivory Coast who’s already opened her home to fellow immigrants Naney and Jolie, Marie invokes the story of Abraham in the first sermon we watch her deliver: “I know you have a plan for me,” he says to God in her telling, and “it is not for me to perish at sea. It is not for me to drown.”

Countless others seeking a better life in the centuries since haven’t been so lucky. Jolie is the only documented member of this distaff quartet, not that her legal status is a true safeguard against being hassled or worse by the authorities. The harder she tries to play by the rules and work within the system, the more those rules change as the powers that be see fit.

‍

Sehiri doesn’t linger on Kenza’s trauma, and neither, for that matter, does Kenza — children are resilient, after all, and one benefit of her not understanding what’s happened is not being unmoored by it. Promised Sky is considerably more low-key than its high-stakes opening might make it sound, with co-writers Anna Ciennik, Malika Cécile Louati, and Sehiri centering their script around lived-in character moments rather than heightened narrative beats. Landlords, police officers, and other authority figures are always threatening to disrupt the precarious status quo, but they’re usually at the periphery rather than the center of the action.

‍

Usually, but not always. Tunisia, both a literal and figurative crossroads between Europe and Africa, has taken a hardline approach to immigration in recent years that has led to accusations of human-rights violations and xenophobia. Sehiri, who grew up in France but is of Tunisian extraction, is considerably more sympathetic to the plight of refugees. Promised Sky never comes across as a heavy-handed sermon, though — just an intimate, ground-level portrait of the kind of people whose stories tend to go untold when competing narratives drown out the discourse.

“I know you have a plan for me, and it is not for me to perish at sea.”

Practicing isn’t always as easy as preaching, and conflict arises when Jolie accuses Marie of not living up to her ideals after she threatens to kick Naney out of the house for what many viewers will consider a minor infraction. We’ll eventually learn that she has very good reasons for being cagey about taking in a child, which Sehiri portrays with as much grace as she does Kenza’s arrival.

‍

All four women are in the country for similar reasons, but Naney’s circumstances make her the most protective of, and inclined to watch over, Kenza. She’s been separated from her own daughter since coming to Tunisia in search of a better life and clearly views the newly orphaned Kenza as a surrogate child, one she can take care of while waiting to be reunited with her own. Promised Sky is as much about the power of maternal instincts as it is about systemic prejudice and the struggle to gain a foothold in a place that seems intent on cutting your legs out from under you. The more obstacles that are placed in front of Marie, Naney, Jolie, and Kenza, the more they realize they have no choice but to persevere — not because they’re special, necessarily, but simply because they’re human.