Film: “The Sea in the Distance” in Quest of Miss Visa

There are films that seep into your guts before they even find their rhythm. “The Sea in the Distance” is one of them. The second feature film by Saïd Hamich Benlarbi, this choral and novelistic narrative spanning nearly a decade is not a simple chronicle of exile: it is an attempt – rare in contemporary cinema – to make you feel the interior of a life in turmoil.

At its center is Nour (portrayed with a striking intensity by Ayoub Gretaa), a 27-year-old from Oujda who arrives in Marseille illegally in the early 1990s. Where other films choose documentary distance, Hamich plunges the eye into the flesh. We don’t just follow the emigration: we live it. We breathe it. We feel it in the heavy silences, the fragile exchanges, the bursts of celebration to the rhythm of raï that make noise in the soul far more than in the speakers.

The film’s writing oscillates between social chronicle and an almost ethereal romance. Unexpected encounters (particularly with Serge, a cop who is both magnetic and fragile, and Noémie, his partner) open a narrative space where human connections twist, recompose, and defy certainties. This relational triangle, far from any simple schema, becomes a crucible of complex, unresolved, and profoundly human emotions.

Over more than one hundred minutes, what strikes is not only the already fine intention, but the way Hamich observes his characters with a generous empathy. Rather than judging exile, he sensory-makes it, he listens to it in its contradictions, its surges of freedom, its relapses into wandering. The Marseille of the 90s is never reduced to a backdrop; it is lived as a character in its own right, vibrating with music, dreams, and disillusionment.

This approach is not without its flaws: some critics have pointed to a certain narrative distance, an impression that the film “skims more than it digs” into the social zones it addresses, or that the story sometimes struggles to get to the bottom of things. This choice to let scenes breathe, to privilege subtle observation over systematic exposition, will be a source of division among audiences. But it is precisely here that the film’s strength lies: in its ability to make tension and release, poetry and the harshness of the world, coexist.

The direction of the actors deserves a chapter of its own. Ayoub Gretaa, in his first major role, carries Nour’s search for meaning with raw truth. Anna Mouglalis and Grégoire Colin bring a contained depth to their characters, instilling in the narrative an open, often wounded, never complacent humanity. The emotion arises less from bravura effects than from the constant attention paid to glances, silences, the breaths of bodies.

Is it a revolutionary film? Perhaps not in its construction. Is it a necessary film? Decidedly, yes. Rarely in recent years has a work managed to combine the intimate and the political, ellipsis and precision, novelistic sweep and social reality, with such accuracy. It is a film that follows you after the credits, that leaves you with the feeling of having shared a little of someone’s life and, by extension, of so many other similar lives.

Whether you embrace it in its entirety or stumble over certain moments, *The Sea in the Distance* imposes a singular voice in the cinematic landscape: that of a cinema which first listens, then makes you feel. A lived-in, fragile, true cinema, a rarity.