By Adem Lazreg
« Promised sky » A film by Erige Sehiri
There’s a moment in Erige Sehiri’s Promised Sky (سماء بلا أرض / Promis le Ciel, 92’, 2025) that stayed with me long after the credits rolled. Promised Sky follows Marie and a group of migrant women living together in Tunis, sharing a fragile home built on solidarity, care, and necessity. As they navigate precarious legal status, invisible power structures, and the constant threat of displacement, the film quietly observes how a community forms in the margins. The protagonist Marie opens her door to let yet another stranger into her already crowded home. It’s such a simple gesture, almost easy to overlook, but it carries a kind of quiet defiance. She keeps welcoming people despite everything working against her. Watching it, I felt something shift in me. Not in a dramatic, epiphany-type way, but like someone peeling away layers of comfort I didn’t realize I’d been hiding under.
What hit me first was how clearly Erige Sehiri portrays the relationship between people who hold power and those who live under its shadow. We rarely see the officials and the administrators. Their presence is felt only through consequences : Naney working in the dark, Marie tiptoeing around invisible lines, the constant low-level fear running through every scene like background noise. These women move through Tunis like creatures in a controlled habitat, monitored and tolerated until the moment they’re not. The individuals behind the rules change, but the structure itself stays exactly the same. At a certain point you start to wonder who’s actually inside the cage… ? These women, or the rest of us pretending we’re not trapped in our own way ?
One of the reasons I connected so deeply with the film is the honesty in Sehiri’s approach. She doesn’t dramatize anything. She watches. She pays attention. And through that attention, we start to see how Marie’s home has quietly turned into a small-scale society of its own. I’m talking about these Ivorian communities inside of Tunisia. It all runs on instinct, on human need. No institution could design something as functional as what these women build together out of necessity. There’s something sad and beautiful in that. Sad because the official structures meant to support people have pushed them into the margins. Beautiful because life still finds a way to organize itself with compassion when nothing will. The deeper you go into the film, the clearer the sickness becomes. Not a sudden crisis, but a slow rot that has spread so far it looks normal. It shows up in the way opportunities vanish right when they seem within reach. It shows up in how fast people learn to live without expecting fairness. It shows up in the looks Marie gives when she knows she’s running out of options but still has to appear steady. Sehiri never spells it out, but it hangs in every frame. Systems create rules, the rules turn into habits, and the habits turn into a culture that quietly erodes everyone inside it. Eventually people adapt. That’s the part that scares me the most. The normalization. The shrugging. The way something outrageous can become just another Tuesday.
What the film made me realize is that we all live under something like provisional freedom. Maybe we don’t like to admit it because it’s uncomfortable, but it’s there. A kind of freedom that feels stable until the moment someone with more power decides it isn’t. Naney works without papers, yes, but how many of us have jobs, protections, or privileges that could disappear with one administrative change? Jolie is carrying the dreams of her whole family on her back, but aren’t most of us carrying some invisible ledger of expectations we’re constantly trying to meet? We pretend we’re secure, but most of what we call “stability” is just a longer leash. Kenza’s story makes this painfully obvious. She survives a literal shipwreck only to land in another kind of uncertainty. Different form, same weight. The more you think about it, the more you realize this is everyone’s story. Maybe not as extreme, maybe not as visible, but familiar in spirit. We’re all trying to make a life between what we’re allowed to do and what we’re capable of doing. Between belonging and barely hanging on.
What makes the film so affecting is how real the relationships feel. Debora Lobe as Naney doesn’t act exhaustion, she wears it. Aïssa Maïga doesn’t play Marie as a character, she inhabits her as a person who has run out of room for superficiality. The camera doesn’t intrude. It observes, and because of that, the tenderness between everyone in the house feels unfiltered. They’ve built a world in the gaps of the larger one, a world held together by necessity and care. It works because it has no choice. It exists because the official world doesn’t see them, or worse, pretends not to. But that world is incredibly fragile. Every knock on the door carries the threat of collapse. Every moment outside the house could shift their entire reality. None of this is heightened for cinematic effect. This is what life looks like when you exist in a state where everything could be taken away at any moment. And this is where the film turns the mirror back on us. We want to believe our own rights are sturdier. Maybe they are for now. But fragility isn’t only something that happens to other people. It’s something that waits for all of us in different forms.
Sehiri doesn’t try to fix anything. She doesn’t pretend she has answers. What she offers instead is proof. Proof that these people lived, struggled, cared for each other, and held onto dignity in a world determined to strip it from them. In a time when entire communities can disappear behind the language of policy and paperwork, simply witnessing them becomes an act of resistance. Watching Promised Sky reminded me how easy it is to slip into the logic that some people deserve less comfort, less safety, less humanity. And how dangerous that logic becomes once you start accepting it. The film ends without tying anything up. It has to. For Marie, Naney, Jolie, and Kenza, nothing is resolved. There is only tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Living, surviving, helping each other, enduring the same uncertainty with the same determination. That determination is contagious. I felt it spreading to me as I watched. I hope it spreads to you too.
