An award-winning slice of life set on Paris’s margins set over 48 helter-skelter hours, Souleymane’s Story is the latest in a series of social realist dramas to tackle Europe’s migrant crisis from the perspective of African migrants. The Dardennes’ Tori and Lokita (2022), Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2023), and Matteo Garrone’s fantastically-tinged Io Capitano (2024) have shared the stories behind the sensationalist headlines – and here’s another one to bring deep humanity and insight to this political football.
Io Capitano followed two Senegalese kids on the Saharan people-trafficking route to Italy. Here, French director Boris Lojkine could almost be picking up where Garrone left off. His twenty-something protagonist, Souleymane Sangaré (Abou Sangaré), has travelled the same path – from Guinea this time – and we meet him as a cog in Paris’s exploitative gig economy, cycling frantically to deliver food orders to apartments across the city and thrusting bags of takeaway into the hands of Parisians who barely notice him.
Lojkine, who co-wrote the naturalistic screenplay with Delphine Agut, has unearthed a real talent in newcomer Sangaré. A Guinean who travelled to France in similar circumstances, he obviously understands Souleymane and his fraying emotions intimately.
But it takes more than first-hand experience to inhabit a character with this much subtlety and skill. Souleymane is introduced in a flash-forward to the interview with France’s asylum affairs people that will decide his future, before jagging back to a lead-up to show him caught in a trap of exploitation as he zigzags through Parisian traffic. We meet the sources of his misery: Emmanuel (Emmanuel Yovanie), the delivery driver who subcontracts Souleymane to his iPhone delivery gig and fobs him off when he asks for payment; Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow), who preps asylum seekers with political dissident back stories and fake papers and wants payment asap; and later, the sympathetic French bureaucrat (Petite Maman’s Nina Meurisse) who has heard – and seen – them all a dozen times.
It takes more than first-hand experience to inhabit a character with this much skill
Navigating the city’s terrifying night-time traffic and shifting from one homeless shelter to another in the early hours, Sangaré conveys these unsustainable stress levels in little gestures rather than big theatrics. He quietly seethes at a restaurant proprietor who holds him up (a cameo from Lojkine) and after a collision with a car, he snaps at a client when she complains that her food has been spilled. There’s no give anywhere: if he loses the phone, smashes the bike, or misses the late-night bus to the shelter, he has nowhere to go.
Needless to say, Souleymane’s Story is not an easy watch. It’s a tough, unsparing and often heartbreaking look at life for the migrants who make the online world tick, and a jolt for those of us who use it unthinkingly. But it’s also a film about the power of community, even one as hastily-built as Souleymane’s fellow West African asylum seekers whose pisstaking solidarity brings comfort to an impossible scenario.
When Sangaré won a best actor award at last year’s Cannes, he still hadn’t received French residency. Talk about life imitating art.
In UK and Ireland cinemas now.