Written and directed by Boris Lokjine, Souleymane’s Story is a vivid and compassionate drama featuring a young Guinean food delivery cyclist racing across Paris, criss-crossing the frenetic streets in a constant race against the clock. Like many others around him, he is an asylum seeker working without permission from the French authorities and “renting” his identity from a friend with legal status.

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Apart from the daily routines of his grindingly exhausting job, Souleymane has to deal with homelessness and exploitation which present him with many practical and emotional challenges.

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Tension rises as, in two days’ time, Souleymane has an interview regarding his asylum application. While striving hard to meet his delivery platform’s demands, he practises anxiously for the interview, rehearsing under the guidance of a “coach” a fabricated story of how he was driven into exile by state oppression. We may disapprove of his dishonesty, yet Souleymane is hard-working, decent and very likeable.

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The film could be described as a social-realist thriller and is a gripping and powerful portrayal of the real-life situation of many workers in the “gig” economy. It has a naturalistic, empathetic script that avoids sentimentality.

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Abou Sangaré as Souleymane gives a remarkable, magnetic and moving performance made all the more compelling in view of his own experience of being denied citizenship by the French authorities. Three times. Souleymane’s Story is deeply personal yet universal.

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The film won four César awards and a Cannes Un Certain Regard Jury Award as well as Best Actor Awards at Cannes and the European Film Awards for Sangaré. This is the first of Lojkine’s films that RFS has shown and I, for one, hope that he will make more that we can screen.

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Claire Cameron

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