Cannes One To Watch: Ivorian Artist Laetitia Ky Sets Her Sights On Superheroes With ‘Promised Sky'

Yahoo

14-05-2025

Having found fame in international art circles for her natural hair sculptures championing African culture, Black beauty and women's rights, Laetitia Ky has now set her sights on building a cinema career. 'I've always had a fascination for superheroes,' says the globe-trotting Ivorian artist and activist on a Zoom call from Monaco, where she is currently midway through a residency at the principality's Quai Art Studios. 'I've watched nearly all the Marvel and DC Comic movies and read all the comics,' she continues, explaining that it is the non-reality of the superhero worlds that fuels her passion.
The Marvel and DC Comic protagonists also chime with the message of empowerment implicit in Ky's elaborate hair-based works — depicting everything from a vacuum cleaner to a butterfly. Ky is in Cannes as one of three actresses in Tunisian-French director Erige Sehiri's Un Certain Regard title Promised Sky.
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The migrant drama, about three Ivorian women living together in the Tunisian capital of Tunis, is Sehri's second fiction feature after 2022 Directors' Fortnight selection Under the Fig Trees.
Sehiri contacted Ky on Instagram, where she has half a million followers, after reading about her in the French edition of Elle magazine, as she was on the verge of traveling to the Ivorian capital of Abidjan to scout for actors. Ky's resulting role as a directionless Ivorian student who finds refuge in the home of a journalist-turned-evangelist pastor, does not play heavily on her hair. 'It was important for me that if I'm going to do cinema, it's not only so that productions can use my hair again and again. I want to be valued as an actress as much as the other actresses on the set,' she says.
Ky was previously seen on the big screen in Giacomo Abbruzzese's 2023 drama Disco Boy and also played the queen in Philippe Lacôte's 2020 fantasy Night of the Kings. Her next cinema goal is to secure an English-language speaking role, while she is also developing a screenplay about a contemporary female African superhero based on Ivory Coast folklore.
'I spent a few months researching it, going to certain places in the interior of the country, to talk to village chiefs who have a strong knowledge of the culture,' she says. 'There are now still 60 ethnic groups in the Ivory Coast, each with their own customs and beliefs. So, I've mixed modern elements with what I heard.'
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