The title of Boris Lojkine’s Souleymane’s Story (L’Histoire de Souleymane) is twofold: On one level, it indicates the story of the film itself, which follows two days in the life of Souleymane Sangaré (Abou Sangare), a Guinean immigrant living and working in Paris. The film is his story. However, the title also refers to the story he is planning on telling for his impending asylum claim interview, which is not his own, but is rather a convenient fiction concocted by Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow), who runs a business helping African immigrants who do not have papers (so called “sans papiers”) work the system to their benefit.

Souleymane is struggling in many ways—struggling in the difficult work of couriering food on his bike through the busy Parisian streets; struggling to make it to the bus each night that will take him to a shelter (otherwise he must sleep on the street); and struggling to remember the fictional story of political persecution he is supposed to memorize and tell to a government official as if it were his own. Life is hard from every angle, and Lojkine, who both wrote and directed, does not soften the edges or minimize how exploitation wells from many springs. Given that the film is about a black African immigrant trying to find asylum in France, one might immediately assume that much of his hardship is racially charged, with white Parisians using or ignoring him. Souleymane’s Story is more complicated than that, as we see that much of Souleymane’s difficulties derive from his treatment by other African immigrants who have already “made it,” particularly Barry, who coaches him to tell a story that he has given to dozens of other asylum seekers, and Mamadou (Mamadou Barry), who lends him his identification so he can get work as a food courier, but then takes half of his earnings.

The film’s lasting impression resides in its nuanced depictions of the power structures that reach all the way down to the lowest rungs of society, where the fight for survival is paramount at every turn. Each moment of Souleymane’s day is fraught with the possibility of collapse, and the film derives much of its tension from the fear we feel that even the slightest misstep will cause the whole, flimsy stack of cards he has been building to fall down around him. As played by Abou Sangare, a nonprofessional actor who, until recently, was a “sans papier” asylum seeker himself, Souleymane is a flawed, but deeply understandable protagonist whose lapses in judgment and occasional losses of control carry with them the very real danger of losing it all. He doesn’t have the benefit of being able to make mistakes.

We become keenly aware of just how much power Barry and others hold over Souleymane’s life, not to mention the asylum agent (Nina Meurisse) who conducts his interview. The question of whether she will buy his story lingers deep into the interview itself, and it is not hard to see why Sangare won the Un Certain Regard Best Performance award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival (the film also won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize). He makes Souleymane into a tangled coil of desperation and doubt, and the film works because it makes us feel those creeping edges of despair.

The film is not all bleakness and hardship, and there are a few moments of levity, especially between Souleymane and Khalil (Younoussa Diallo), a Middle Eastern man he sees each night at the shelter. There is a sense of camaraderie among the asylum seekers and immigrants that reminds us of the beauty of human connection in even the worst circumstances, although that is also cut through at times with competition and tension. Lojkine’s aesthetic approach is typical of the style of modern European neorealism—handheld cameras riding fast behind Souleymane as he cycles down the streets to deliver food, unsteady close-ups and long takes to emphasize the reality of it all—but it works. If the film had been any longer is might have started to drag (as last year’s big Cannes prize winner Anora did), but Lojkine knows just when it to cut it off, even if we don’t have all the answers.

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