Amel Guellaty attends the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Where the Wind Comes From” at the Egyptian Theatre on January 26, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Shelby Shaw
“Tunisia is a country in North Africa,” writer-director Amel Guellaty opens with to the audience in the Egyptian Theatre on January 26. “It’s an Arab country, and let’s say it’s the most ‘open-minded’ Arab country in the Arab world.” Guellaty, herself Tunisian, is onstage for the post-premiere Q&A of her film, Where the Wind Comes From, which includes Tunisia as a constant character in the background. “It’s a country where women have a lot of freedom, where there is the right [to] abortion, where there is a legal code just to protect a woman’s right. But at the same time, it’s still a Muslim Arab country, so the youth there [are] a bit in the middle.” There is a lot of unemployment, she says, and most of the young people she has encountered say that they want to leave. Although she can understand why, Guellaty finds it heartbreaking that so many youthful creatives, when asked their dream, say that they want to leave Tunisia.
“I wanted to show that [young people] struggle, but at the same time, I didn’t want to do a drama. I wanted to do a comedy where we can see this creativity, where we can see this energy. It was kind of an ode to the youth of my country,” Guellaty tells the audience about making her film. Set to a soundtrack of mostly independent Tunisian bands cherry-picked by Guellaty, Where the Wind Comes From, premiering in the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition, follows two friends in Tunisia: 19-year-old rebellious Alyssa (Eya Bellagha), who looks after her younger sister and her unwell mom, and 23-year-old Mehdi (Slim Baccar), who’s trying to put his degree in computer science to use by starting a business, despite being more passionate about making art. While the two have known each other for so long that they’re almost like siblings, their dreams keep them wanting more than what their lives have to offer them locally. But they know that leaving behind their families and culture to live their dreams is an unlikely possibility.
Until the day Alyssa sees an ad for an art competition that will award the winner a residency in Germany. She convinces Mehdi to enter, gushing that they can get married before he goes so that she can accompany him on this ticket out of Tunisia. Caught between responsibility, reality, and fantasy, the two friends clash on the feasibility of attaining their dreams with this scheme, yet they decide to do the best they can to try.
“For me, the adversary, the obstacle, is Tunisia, is the country itself,” says Guellaty, when asked about the ambiguity of specific conflict. Guellaty continues to tell how she was drawn to using the road trip genre for the film as a way to show the many different facets of Tunisia: both the beautiful parts and the troubled parts. By having her characters literally travel across the land, Guellaty could capture what they love about it as well as why they are trapped.
“I think imagination is something that everybody [has], whatever their social background, their economical background, everybody has imagination,” Guellaty emphasizes, gesturing to Bellagha and Baccar onstage beside her for the Q&A. “We can develop it or not, but both of my characters have an overflowing imagination that can help them to escape, sometimes, a rough reality. They use [their imagination] to get closer to each other.” Dreaming of a better future together is a lot more powerful than fantasizing alone.
