By Lucy Spicer
One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Festival is having a front-row seat for the bright future of independent filmmaking. While we can learn a lot about the filmmakers from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival through the art that these storytellers share with us, there's always more we can learn about them as people. We decided to get to the bottom of those artistic wells with our ongoing series: Give Me the Backstory!
With her feature debut, Tunisian writer-director Amel Guellaty set out to tell a story about characters we rarely get to see on screen: Tunisian youth. More specifically, the dynamic between two very different young people who dream of escaping their current reality. This is the story of a true friendship between a girl and a boy, says Guellaty of her film Where the Wind Comes From, which premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It was very important for me to write this kind of story, where two characters can share such deep emotional ties without ever involving sexuality. And I think this kind of relationship is not represented enough in cinema, even though it's so common in life. At least, it is in my life.
Where the Wind Comes From follows 19-year-old Alyssa (Eya Ballagha) and 23-year-old Mehdi (Slim Baccar) as they embark on a road trip to the south of Tunisia for a contest that the outspoken Alyssa believes could be their ticket out of their stagnant circumstances. Up until this point, Alyssa and Mehdi have been using their imaginations to dream of a different life, which Guellaty shows through surreal and comedic sequences. Regardless of social background or level of education, everyone has an imagination, a refuge in their mind that allows them to escape, explains the filmmaker. This refuge has always been important to me, and I wanted to bring it to life through images in my first film.
Read on to learn more about Guellaty and Where the Wind Comes From, including the unusual journey to casting Alyssa and how the writer-director crafted characters who break away from Arab stereotypes.
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