Souleymane’s Story Review

Souleymane (Abou Sangaré) has migrated from Guinea to Paris, desperate to make enough money to send to his ailing mother back home. He’s awaiting a meeting regarding his request for asylum, but in the meantime, he goes about his days illicitly working as a courier, trying to work out where he’s going to sleep every night, and going to classes to learn the best ways of succeeding at his asylum hearing. A cascading run of bad luck leaves his already precarious existence in serious jeopardy.

In tone, Souleymane’s Story – written and directed by Boris Lojkine (who co-wrote with Delphine Agut) – mirrors the unstable life of its protagonist. Throughout the movie, Souleymane cycles through Paris with the intense velocity of a man pursued. Neither he, nor we, can relax for a minute, as a minute could make the difference between missing the last bus to the homeless shelter or having no bed for the night; getting a customer’s delivery on time, or being locked out of his only way of making any income. It would be a brutal burden for anybody to bear, let alone a man who’s already undergone so much before he’d even arrived in Paris.

While it is in many ways a bleak, hard-going watch, there’s a lot more to Souleymane’s Story than a generic slice of social miserabilism. The systemic failures are the movie’s concrete, but there are little bursts of human hope everywhere, like flowers in a cracked pavement – a woman he collects one of his deliveries from offers Souleymane a piece of candy, Souleymane offers to help a lonely old French man cut his pizza even though it would put him off schedule, the kinship of the men at the shelter who offer Souleymane advice for his interview. None of it equates to the overpowering cruelty of the system he’s trapped within, but these moments offer a valuable reminder that the problem lies there, not with the inhumanity of people.

Playing the man enmeshed in the middle of it all, Abou Sangaré gives one of the year’s most devastating performances. In a meta case of art mirroring life, Sangaré himself was an undocumented immigrant up until early this year, after his widely lauded turn in Souleymane’s Story (he won Best Actor in Un Certain Regard at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival) earned him a visa allowing him to stay and work in France. Although the film is not straightforwardly autobiographical, Sangaré’s evocation of Souleymane’s anxiety and exhaustion is so blisteringly raw, it will be no surprise to those who watch it that it’s coming from a place of deep personal knowledge. Just as moving as those scenes however, are the fleeting moments that allow Souleymane to show flashes of his infectious grin, and remind us of the way the system is designed to crush the life out of people.

Taken on its own terms, Souleymane’s Story is a riveting, wrenching piece of deeply humanist cinema. Against this current toxic climate of anti-migrant sentiment? It’s vital viewing.

★★★★★