Award-winning Paris thriller The Story of Souleymane shows the trials of food delivery workers

Australia Broadcast Center

6 hours ago

Story of Souleymane is bookended by the anticipation and aftermath of a life-changing interview, one where Guinean asylum seeker Souleymane (Abou Sangaré) finds out if he'll be granted residency in France. All background noise is momentarily blocked out, lending both Souleymane and the audience a rare moment of stillness.
What: A tense three days in the life of an undocumented Guinean asylum seeker.
Directed by: Boris Lojkine
Starring: Abou Sangaré, Alpha Oumar Sow, Emmanuel Yovanie, Nina Meurisse
Where: In cinemas now
Likely to make you feel: Devastated
Preceding these two scenes in the award-winning social realist drama from French director Boris Lojkine are nail-bitingly stressful sequences that chart Souleymane manoeuvring the opaque, highly flawed system that greets many asylum seekers upon arrival in Europe.
Unfolding over the course of three days, the film traces Souleymane's pursuit of dignity, money and shelter — often without a single cent on him and fuelled almost exclusively by coffee.
Without any legal working rights, Souleymane illicitly rents a food-delivery account from a fellow African migrant named Emmanuel (Emmanuel Yovanie), who's ascended a few rungs above him, to the point that he's able to exploit newcomers, and who takes a hefty cut of whatever Souleymane earns.
As he awaits his interview with the immigration department that will adjudicate on his right to stay in France, he wends around Paris as a bicycle deliveryman, imperilling his life as he races against time to deliver food and make a semblance of a living wage.
Further compounding his financial worries is a "fixer" of sorts named Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow), who he's paying to provide fake papers and feed him a pre-rehearsed story about why he fled Guinea. Souleymane has his own reasons for leaving, but he's afraid they won't be persuasive enough to grant him asylum, so he leans on this story of torture and incarceration — desperately memorising it as he crisscrosses Paris's heavy traffic on his bike.
Story of Souleymane is incredibly tense and claustrophobic; he is always on the verge of colliding with the congested cavalcade of cars in inner-city Paris. Of all the things Souleymane lacks, time is one of his most finite resources. He hustles to pick up orders quickly enough so he can proceed with the next and rushes to the one scheduled bus that will transport him to a homeless shelter for the night.
So much of his life is mired in soul-sapping cycles of bureaucracy, and when the film finally unhooks from its frenzied pace, it's because Souleymane is forced into doing something even more dehumanising: staking out Emmanuel, who refuses to take his calls and pay him his wages for a day of relentless food runs.
Everyone is complicit in the subjugation of Souleymane and, by extension, asylum seekers like him who languish in the cracks of the system. This includes the state, which confers no legal working rights to people seeking asylum, while expecting them to survive without resorting to nefarious means; which demands a single story that's uncomplicated and easily digestible.
It also includes the people who order food through delivery apps, desensitised to the plight of the people delivering their ease and comfort. The restaurants who cavalierly abuse the system and, in turn, the people who depend on it for their livelihood. The predators who flagrantly prey on asylum seekers who have little-to-no choices, like Barry and Emmanuel.
There are glimmers of goodness from people, often when Souleymane least expects it. The OFPRA agent, played by Nina Meurisse, who interviews Souleymane in an incredibly stirring final scene, displays as much empathy as allowed in a tightly regulated system designed to degrade.
Non-professional actor Sangaré — an undocumented 24-year-old migrant himself until after the film was released — is exquisite in his understated, carefully calibrated debut performance as Souleymane.
The thin veneer Souleymane's built around himself to survive the drudgery of his everyday existence gives way at key junctures: when he speaks to his mum and girlfriend back home; when he meets with violence; when he's relaying his story in his own words.
The way Sangaré transitions back and forth between moments of great pain, overwhelming love and feigned stoicism is masterful.
The Paris we see in Story of Souleymane is necessarily removed from romanticised images of the City of Love. The Eiffel Tower and Louvre are far from view –Souleymane's Paris is closer to the ground, enmeshed in a community of mostly West African food-delivery drivers as they oscillate seamlessly between their mother tongues and the French of their colonisers. We glimpse the inner workings of homeless shelters, soup kitchens, asylum-seeker-processing centres, apartments in which Souleymane takes respite in.
The sound design is dramatic yet realist; there's no lulling soundtrack to distract us from the minutiae of Souleymane's ruthless existence. The sound of his bicycle is magnified amongst the din of a city that chews people up and spits them back out.
When the sound finally cuts out at the end, it's a relief. The outcome of the interview is unclear, but Souleymane's role in the dehumanising process is over and, with that, some of the tension of the preceding 48 hours.
The Story of Souleymane is currently showing in selected cinemas.