Promis le ciel

Erige Seheri’s PROMIS DE CIEL opens with a scene rich in uncertainty, yet also care. Marie, Jolie and Naney are seated around Kenza, a four-year-old child who has just landed in their orbit after a failed attempt to cross the Mediterranean from Tunis together with her relatives. The relationship between the three leads and their new ward is initially ambiguous, but the nature of this unique arrangement and their individual personalities is gradually revealed, alongside the elements that bind them. The stalwart Marie runs an underground church in the same home where she rents rooms both to the privileged Jolie, recently arrived to pursue her studies, and to the kind if erratic Naney, desperate to improve her situation. For all their talents, complexities and differences, the web of micro and macro aggressions the trio must navigate repeatedly reduces them to nothing more than interchangeable Black woman—or, in the more frequent and vituperative parlance, “sub-Saharans”. Set and shot during a shameful moment in recent Tunisian history marked by mass and indiscriminate detainment and the expulsion of the country’s Black individuals, Sehiri’s film is unflinching in the j’accuse it hurls at her home nation. (Jesse Cumming)

In the presence of Erige Sehiri.

Erige Sehiri: FAMILY ALBUMS (2012), LE FACEBOOK DE MON PÈRE (2013, K), THE TEARING (2018, K), STUDENTS (2018, K), RAILWAY MEN (2019), THE STATION MASTER (2020, K), UNDER THE FIG TREES (2022)