A moving glimpse of Ivorian life in Tunisia - and a warning
Daniel Nelson
Promised Sky, about three Ivorian women struggling to make new lives in a less-than-welcoming country, is a reality for millions of migrants around the world today — and may be a worrying future for many in UK unless we manage to halt the rise of the far Right and its anti-immigrant agenda.
The film is set in Tunisia, with the focus on a small community of African Christians living and working in the face of anti-African racism. As director Erige Sehiri has pointed out: “...more than 80% of migrations take place within the African continent.”
It opens with a trio of women — an evangelical preacher, an alcohol dealer, and a student (the only one. whose papers are in order — bathing a four-year-old child, asking her what she remembers of her arrival in, dreaded words, a small boat.
Luckily, the girl is being looked after by a loving, life-affirming group, all of whom have problems and ambitions of their own. Slowly it becomes clear that outside the community the police are harassing anyone who is a Black African or a recent arrival — and perhaps, as has recently been mooted in the UK, anyone deemed not to fit, or even those who arrived in the not-so-recent past.
The presence of a child begins to affect the relatively stable lives of the three women, who simply want to work or study and make the best of the situations in which they find themselves.
For audiences attuned to the impact of Britain’s hostile environment policy, the tensions facing the women are worryingly heightened by indications that the police are becoming more aggressive and less careful about the people they pick up and push into police vans.
All this is seen through the lives of characters who, whatever their weaknesses, can only be seen as good people, even if they are forced to make compromises in order to survive.
Most of the Tunisians they rub up against in their everyday lives are seen as well-meaning, if weak.
Sehiri has concocted a moving, humane drama. But despite the women’s positivity, occasional joy, religious strength and determination to make the best of whatever is thrown at them, it’s also both sad and gripping, as lives spiral out of control. The film’s final action leaves you wondering what will happen next, a reflection of the film’s story-telling style: it presents conversations and situations but doesn’t try to fill and explain every detail of the protagonists’ lives. Nevertheless, you get the picture.
Disturbingly, the experience of this small community in Tunisia is shared by others elsewhere. We mustn’t let it happen here in UK. At the time of writing it’s hard to be optimistic.