The story of an African immigrant in Paris, working under the radar while trying to obtain refugee status.
The plight of the migrant, and the refugee, is a central story of our century. Now in a recent film called Souleymane’s Story, we witness three days in the struggle of one young man to win the right to asylum in France, where he wants to live and work.
Souleymane, an immigrant from Guinea, played by Abou Sangaré, has an appointment in a couple days to be interviewed by the Office for Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons. He is employed doing food deliveries by bicycle in Paris. Throughout the film the camera follows his bike through the streets, and we get a feeling for how hard it is for him, a country boy, to navigate his way through this huge city. Nothing in this situation is simple. He only has the job because an immigrant from Cameroon that he knows lets him use his delivery employee account, while taking half his earnings in return.
He’s part of a group of African immigrants who are paying what little they can to a French Guinean who coaches them in what to say in the asylum interview. Souleyman has to claim that he’s escaping political oppression in order to qualify, and so this coach has given him a complicated story about being arrested and tortured in Guinea for being a part of an opposition group. Souleymane has trouble memorizing this story, and the sad conclusion we must draw is that he’s really escaping wretched economic conditions, but this truth isn’t sufficient to pass as a refugee.
Souleymane’s time is filled with difficult effort. His friend from Cameroon hasn’t paid him yet. The asylum coach is demanding that he must be paid in full before giving him the documents he needs for the interview. There are customers who cheat him, and with all the running and riding around, he still has to get to a bus at a certain time in the evening because he’s part of a group of Africans staying at a shelter on the city’s outskirts. In brief snatches of free time he calls home to his mother, who’s suffering from mental illness, and his girlfriend, who tells him that someone has proposed marriage to her. Far away from his native land, everything from his past seems to be slipping away.
The film is directed by Boris Lojkine, who co-wrote the screenplay with Delphine Agut. The reviewers have cited many possible influences behind Lojkine’s gritty naturalistic style. It reminded me, with its roving camera, absence of music, and a focus on the margins of society, of the Dardenne brothers, the great Belgian filmmakers who broke with tradition to create a new kind of social realism. But Lojkine’s work has its own unique intimate quality. His big coup was discovering the lead actor, Abou Sangaré, a French Guinean auto mechanic who had never acted in anything before. Some of Sangaré’s own story was blended into the character of Souleymane, and his performance is mesmerizing. He shows us not only the suffering but the humor and sensitivity of this character. He’s a good spirit who has moments of lightness where he can kid around with friends. All of the striving, the desperate scrambling to survive, leads in the end, with perfect dramatic logic, to the ultimate goal—the actual interview that will decide his fate.
Souleymane’s Story is about the injustice of the immigration system, reflected in the moving story of a man just trying to be true to who he is.
