by Mell P
The 33rd New York African Film Festival opened on Wednesday, May 6th at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York premiere of Promised Sky, directed by Erige Sehiri, and the room felt it.
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Spoken entirely in French and Arabic and filmed in Tunisia, a former colony of France, the 95-minute film tells a captivating tale of survival, prejudice, struggle, sadness, triumph, hope, and at the core of it all, sisterhood.
The story follows three women, Aminata (known in the film as Marie), Jolie, and Naney, who are living without legal documents in Tunis, navigating daily life under the constant threat of police raids and institutional racism. Aminata, the eldest and the anchor of the group, runs a makeshift church out of the home they share. She is caretaker, pastor, and surrogate mother all at once. When Kenza, a young girl who arrives on a boat without her parents, enters their world, Aminata takes her in too, quietly expanding the circle of her chosen family.
Each woman carries a life left behind. Naney is a young mother searching for a better future. Jolie is a student weighted down by her family’s expectations. And Aminata, who changed her own name, holds the household together while quietly carrying her own history.
The film’s most gripping scene centers on Jolie, the one in the group with actual paperwork. She is arrested and brought to a police station, where she is pressured to sign documents written in Arabic, a language she cannot read. The scene lands with full weight when you understand the stakes: those who don’t sign don’t go home.
French-Tunisian film director, Erige Sehiri, came to the film with the rigor of an investigative journalist, which is exactly what she was before making it. She develops Tunisian author driven documentaries , and for this film she spent two years researching and was moved by a striking statistic, that 80% of African migration happens within Africa, not toward Western countries. With her parents being from Tunisia, she returned to immerse herself in the culture, so this film was made from the inside.
That intimacy was hard-won. Real arrests were happening in Tunisia during production, which pushed most scenes indoors. The actresses themselves experienced direct racism, followed through supermarkets by Arab men who assumed they were stealing. The political situation was not backdrop. It was the air they breathed on set.
Actress Laetitia Ky (Jolie) said,“It was important for me to be part of projects that are not just aethestic, but that address issues that I do in my art.” Aïssa Maïga (Marie) echoed the call to stay engaged, especially to African storytelling.
Aminata also shared something subtle and striking about the film’s sisterhood: it mirrors the bond that formed between the director, who is Arab, and her cast. Sehiri built real closeness with her actresses so she could truly understand the perspective of an African woman living in Tunisia. The film’s emotional core grew from that relationship.
Promised Sky originally opened the Un Certain Regard section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and has since traveled through international festivals. It arrived at NYAFF already carrying weight, and the audience at Lincoln Center felt the full force of it.
During the Q&A that followed, one guest noted the film isn’t just an African story, it’s an American one too, resonant in this very political moment. A Tunisian audience member was moved to apologize, saying the film opened a part of her country she hadn’t known existed.
For Black Americans in the audience, the film was a mirror they didn’t expect. The women being surveilled in a supermarket, assumed guilty before they reached the register. The arrest that hinges not on what you did, but on whether you can read the paperwork in front of you. The daily calculus of how to move through a space that was never designed to welcome you. These are not foreign scenes. They are Friday afternoons in American cities, stop-and-frisk on American corners, Miranda rights read to people who don’t fully understand what they’re waiving. The struggles faced in the often-segregated dwellings of Tunisia go hand-in-hand with the inner-city realities of Black Americans. Promised Sky doesn’t draw that line explicitly, it doesn’t need to. The audience drew it themselves, quietly, in the dark.
And then there was the quiet irony hanging over the evening: the director, Erige Sehiri, was not in the room. She was denied a visa to enter the United States. A film about women who cannot move freely through the world, screened in New York, without its director, who could not move freely to be there.
Promised Sky asks us to sit with that, and not look away.
