Abou Sangaré: brilliant in the title role

SOULEYMANE’S STORY
Directed by Boris Lojkine
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆☆

Souleymane’s Story was a film crying out to be made. It is a careful, unsentimental but deeply moving, consideration of the plight of one person buffeted by the storms of circumstance to fight for a little piece of dignity.

Director Boris Lojkine has created a tense tale set over a week in Paris, where we follow Souleymane (Abou Sangaré), as he tries to scratch a living delivering food across the city – and gets prepped for a make-or-break asylum interview that will dictate if he can make a new life for himself in France.

Souleymane is a Guinean migrant with no papers, living in a twilight world where exploitation and lack of respect meet him at every turn.

His reaction feels human, uncontrived and avoids cliché: this feels like a very realistic prism through which we can see clearly for once, despite it happening under our noses, the economic currents that flow through our streets, powered by the unseen exploited.

Sangare is a brilliant lead, helped by scene setting direction: it is a hair-raising experience, following Souleymane as he dashes from one restaurant – where the staff sneer at him – to the homes of hungry food orderers, who also sneer at him. Much was shot by a cameraman trailing after Sangore as he darted through Parisian traffic: it adds a precarious sense of urgency to the narrative.

This film feels important, without any arrogance from the cast and director.

And you can easily transfer this tale to our streets. Last year, the New Journal covered the scandal of food delivery accounts being sub-contracted over and again to drivers who worked off the books.

Next time you curse at a delivery biker’s poor road sense, please try and think about what they are going through to scratch a living.