There are films that ask you to sit back and be entertained, and there are films that ask for more. They ask for your patience, your empathy, your discomfort, and your attention to the small details that often go unnoticed in lives that unfold at the margins. Boris Lojkine’s “Souleymane’s Story” belongs to that second category. It is a patient, quietly devastating character study about a young man from Guinea who wants nothing more than to begin again in a place that insists on making that dream feel impossible. The drama is tender and unflinching at once, not because it revels in pain, but because it understands how modern systems often insist on packaging pain into something legible before they consent to recognize a person’s humanity.
Souleymane, played with radiant restraint by Abou Sangaré, is a newcomer to France, and he is new to the idea that survival in this new world demands a performance. The immediate stakes of that performance are clear. He is seeking asylum. But asylum, as the film reveals in one patient scene after another, is not granted on the basis of who you are. It is often determined by how convincingly you can produce a story that fits the expectations of a bureaucracy trained to hear certain kinds of suffering. What if you are a person whose instinct is honesty. What if you are someone who struggles to memorize a script. What if the most unnatural act in your life is to stand in front of a cold official and lie.
The film opens with a portrait of waiting. Souleymane sits among others, quiet, observant, a bruise blooming around his eye, a white shirt marked with faint stains he tries to clean away. The image is telling. He is a man trying to straighten himself in order to be seen as worthy, trying to polish the exterior as if order at the edges might convince the gatekeepers of his value. The film then steps back a few days to show us the precarious routine that fills his hours. Souleymane bicycles through the city as a delivery worker, a ghost in traffic, one among many riders who glide through streets that belong to everyone and no one. He does not yet have a place to call home and he does not have the paperwork that would let him work openly. He does what many in his situation do. He rents a delivery account from Emmanuel, played by Emmanuel Yovanie, who stocks shelves in a beauty supply store and lends his identity for a fee. It is a common informal practice, the film tells us, a quiet economy built on the needs and fears of those who do not exist on paper. It is another way a life can be reduced to a number that someone else can profit from.
With what remains of his earnings, Souleymane pays for classes from Barry, played by Alpha Oumar Sow, who provides the forms needed for asylum hearings and offers something even more critical. He crafts a narrative. Barry teaches people like Souleymane how to present themselves at the immigration office in a way that might lead to a favorable decision. The story he builds for Souleymane is detailed and political. In Barry’s version, our lead is a member of the Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea, the socially liberal opposition party that grew in strength as President Alpha Condé consolidated power. Souleymane’s supposed origin point of resistance is a personal wound. Condé’s policies led to demolitions in his neighborhood, erasing homes without a second thought. In response, he joins the opposition, and he rises to the rank of security chief. He is arrested in the turmoil of the 2019 protests and subjected to brutal treatment in prison. He escapes and wanders across borders before finally arriving in France.
On the page this tale is convincing. It is precisely the kind of arc that asylum officers are trained to recognize. And yet the film is not really about whether the story is true. It is about the costs of making such a story the price of entry into an ordinary life. For a man like Souleymane, who hesitates before telling even a harmless fiction, who seems to hold honesty in his body as a kind of dignity, the choreography of memorizing details and practicing lines is both comically difficult and internally corrosive. Watching him struggle to remember dates and titles and names is painful not because he is simple, but because the very act pulls him away from himself. The system insists that he speak in a language not his own, a language where suffering must follow a clear sequence and heroism must be legible on command.
Around him the city grinds on. Lojkine does not sentimentalize Paris as a postcard. He lets the streets appear as a maze of indifferent corridors. The camera, guided by cinematographer Tristan Galand, often cools the frame with shades of blue, as if the light itself is weary. The color drains warmth from the world without emptying it of feeling. We see Souleymane from a modest distance in many cycling shots, often placed at a medium remove that denies easy intimacy. Xavier Sirven’s editorial rhythms repeat the image of him riding, again and again, as deliveries blur and days pass. These repetitions create a quiet drumbeat that communicates both endurance and erasure. It is a portrait of a man always in motion and never arriving, a person in a city that only notices him when he is late.
The film does not flatten the people around Souleymane into stock villains or saviors, though many are wrapped in their own self interests. Some white customers barely see him as a person. Their impatience is a form of contempt, an unspoken judgment that he does not belong. And yet it would be too simple to say that bigotry only flows one way. The film also shows how prejudice and cynicism can be internalized and reissued within immigrant communities under pressure. Emmanuel, who profits from the rental of his account, speaks to Souleymane with the scorn of someone eager to distance himself from those who do not have what he has. His comments reduce Souleymane to a caricature and blame people like him for their own precariousness. Barry, too, is easily annoyed when Souleymane struggles to remember. His frustration curdles into blanket judgments. Even back home, the man charged with watching over Souleymane’s mother ties every act of care to the immediate calculation of phone credits. A son’s devotion becomes another ledger to be tallied and settled.
And still, the film leaves room for grace. Souleymane jokes with other delivery riders. He receives real assistance from people at the shelter where he finds temporary refuge. Small acts of kindness arrive without fanfare, and they land with a grateful weight because they are not amplified or staged as lessons. They are simply there, like the occasional burst of sunlight that slips past the blue. Above all, there is Sangaré’s performance. It is easy to imagine how such a role could be played with oversized gestures and speeches filled with anguish. Sangaré chooses another path. His work is internal and present, made up of glances, a posture that shifts with fatigue, and a smile that appears like a brief clearing in bad weather. He won the Best Performance prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, an acknowledgment that feels precise because what he does is not loud. It is deeply calibrated.
In writing the film, Lojkine collaborates with Delphine Agut, and together they make careful choices about how much of Souleymane’s history to show and how to balance the audience’s need to understand with the character’s need to remain a person rather than a case file. The film takes inspiration from Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” not in the strict sense of plot, but in its steady, observational approach to a person who must navigate a maze of obstacles to access a right that should have been simple. The comparison that comes to mind while watching Sangaré is also Charles Jang’s work in Sean Baker and Tsou Shih Ching’s “Take Out,” another story of an undocumented delivery worker who moves through a city that barely registers his existence. In both performances, the actors translate complex feelings without melodrama. They let us see determination and despair as neighbors.
If you pay attention to the shape of “Souleymane’s Story,” you can anticipate where it is going. That predictability might sound like a flaw, but in practice it becomes part of the film’s honesty. The routines of bureaucracy are predictable. The feeling of entering a government office with your future dangling on how you answer a series of questions is predictable. The manner in which systems flatten particular lives into generic categories is predictable. The film does not mistake this predictability for boredom. Instead, it treats it as a condition of the world it depicts. What matters is not surprise. What matters is whether the ending earns its emotional release. The finale does. There is an immigration office scene in which the truth that the film has held at its edges finally steps into the center. Another actor might have played it as a calculated crescendo. Sangaré refuses that path. He lets the moment land with raw clarity. The scene is piercing because it arrives with the exact weight of reality, not the inflated weight of cinema.
Beyond its specific plot, the film offers a pointed critique of how asylum systems operate as theaters of pain. You must show your wounds. You must narrate your fear in a way that satisfies a template. You must fix your life to a timeline and summon tidy meanings out of messy events. There is something profoundly troubling about asking people to present their past suffering as a ticket to basic safety. The film understands that the demand to narrate can itself be another form of violence. It is a moral injury to force a person to reorder their memories to suit an official expectation. You watch Souleymane practice lines that feel unreal in his mouth and you feel the distance between his actual experience and the story he must inhabit. That distance gathers pressure until it bends the whole narrative into a moment of catharsis that is both inevitable and surprising.
The film is also attentive to the ways capitalism and racism reinforce each other. The gig economy promises flexibility and freedom, but it often functions as a trap for those without status. Renting accounts, racing against the clock for tips, swallowing insults in order to keep the work coming, all of this forms a net that keeps a person moving but never lifted. The city becomes a racetrack without a finish line. The camera’s choice to hold Souleymane at a slight distance during his rides is significant. We are always close enough to feel the wind and the traffic, but far enough not to intrude on him with false intimacy. That distance mirrors the way the city sees him. He is a body on a bike, a helmet, a bag, an order number on a screen. The blue tones are not just a stylistic flourish. They signal coolness, a bureaucratic chill that creeps into public spaces and private moments. Even warmth has to push through that light.
Lojkine and his collaborators find humanity not through grand speeches but in precise details. The soundscape hums with the whirr of bicycle chains, the echo of stairwells, the hiss of bus doors, the murmur of strangers. The editing returns to key images with a gentle insistence, building a rhythm of labor and waiting that becomes the texture of Souleymane’s days. The filmmaking resists the temptation to punctuate every beat with an assertion of meaning. Instead, it trusts the viewer to notice how a glance or a pause can carry a chapter’s worth of information. That trust is rare. It is what allows the film to feel both intimate and ethical, resisting exploitation even as it confronts the realities that often get exploited on screen.
As a character, Souleymane is not drawn as a saint or a victim. He is careful, hopeful, and sometimes naive in ways that feel entirely human. He wants to believe that if he behaves decently, if he works hard and keeps his head down, things will go his way. Watching that hope brush against the world’s indifference is difficult. Yet the film refuses despair. It gives him a space to be awkward, to be funny with his friends, to sometimes be wrong, to be a son who worries about his mother and wants to send money even when he has little to spare. The phone calls back home are tender and fraught. They are transactions but also lifelines, reminders that every decision he makes in Paris vibrates through a kitchen far away where another life depends on his choices.
The people who exploit him are not monsters, though the harm they do is real. Emmanuel’s casual cruelty is born of his own desire to climb and his fear of falling. Barry believes he serves a practical good when he drills his clients on their lines and scolds them for mistakes. The man who looks after Souleymane’s mother may be selfish, or he may be exhausted and poor. None of this excuses bad behavior. It places it in a context where scarcity becomes a pressure cooker and where people pass along the stress that presses on them. The film is clear about who holds power. The state has the final say. The corporations that run delivery platforms extract labor with little responsibility. The rest of the characters play roles in a hierarchy that they did not design but are compelled to enforce in their small spheres.
One of the more haunting questions the film raises is this. What does honesty mean in a system that rewards storytelling more than it rewards truth. Is a rehearsed tale that aligns with reality but adjusts details an act of deceit, or a survival tactic in a world that refuses to meet people where they are. The film does not deliver an easy answer. It lets the audience sit with the discomfort of watching a man who values truth consider a lie not for personal gain, but for the chance at a life where he might one day not have to lie. That moral complexity is the heart of the film. It is what gives the final scenes their power. The resolution is not a twist. It is a revelation about a person deciding who he will be in the face of a system that would prefer him to be anyone else.
When the film premiered at Cannes in 2024, it arrived in a climate where many viewers, especially Black viewers, are wary of stories that use Black pain as spectacle, particularly when those stories are told by white film makers. That caution is wise. There is a long history of cinema that turns trauma into a voyeuristic commodity. “Souleymane’s Story” avoids that trap. It does so by refusing to dramatize suffering for its own sake and by remaining attuned to what the audience needs to know rather than what it could be forced to watch. Lojkine and Delphine Agut’s script is respectful of the character’s dignity, and it is discerning about when to show and when to hold back. The result is a film that feels guided by empathy rather than pity.
If the film can be faulted for anything, it might be that its trajectory is visible early on. Yet what keeps it absorbing is how each step deepens our understanding of the man at its center. Our investment is not in a puzzle to be solved, but in a person whose choices reveal themselves to be both ordinary and brave. Sangaré’s performance ensures that even familiar beats ring with new feeling. He resists the urge to underline emotion. He sits with it. He lets silence do some of the talking. When he finally speaks in that critical office scene, it is as if the film exhales. The catharsis is clean. It is not engineered to make us applaud. It is meant to make us see.
That is the quiet achievement of “Souleymane’s Story.” It keeps faith with its character. It keeps faith with the idea that the measure of a person is not the sum of their documented wounds, not the amount of money someone can extract from their labor, and not the stereotypes that get attached to their face. It asks us to consider what kind of society trains itself to hear only certain kinds of voices and to see only certain kinds of bodies. It holds up a mirror to systems that insist on order at the cost of compassion. And then, gently, it points to the possibility that another way is available, one in which truth is not forced through a template, and dignity does not have to be earned by performing misery.
By the time the credits roll, you feel the city as a living presence, both beautiful and unforgiving. You have watched a man move through its currents, and you have watched him refuse to become only what those currents demand. That refusal is small and radical at once. It is the point of art like this. To remind us that behind forms and lines and rehearsed stories there is a person. To insist that we look for him not only when he is in a government office or a hospital, not only when he is front and center, but also when he is a figure on a bicycle, gliding through blue light, another worker in a city that keeps moving. The film will stay with you because it is honest. It is honest about cruelty, about kindness, about exploitation, and about resilience. Above all, it is honest about a single human being and what it costs to claim a life in a place that does not yet recognize you.
