L’histoire de Souleymane
Boris Lojkine (2024)
This drama’s many merits include a simple but clever title. Boris Lojkine, who wrote the screenplay with Delphine Agut, tells the story of Souleymane Sangaré, a young Guinean immigrant seeking asylum in present-day France. Souleymane’s story is also the piece of fiction he’s preparing for his imminent interview with OFPRA (France’s Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons) in Paris. Souleymane’s Story begins in the OFPRA building, before moving into an extended flashback of the previous forty-eight hours in Souleymane’s life. Lojkine then returns to his starting point, which leads into the climactic interview.
The film’s structure calls to mind Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Two Days, One Night (2014) and Lojkine’s themes have echoes of both that film and the Dardennes’ Tori and Lokita (2022). In Two Days, One Night, Marion Cotillard played a woman set to lose her job unless she managed, over the course of a weekend, to persuade enough of her co-workers to sign a petition in her support. Souleymane (Abou Sangaré) has two days in which to finish learning his OFPRA script; pay Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow), the social worker who’s coaching him, in exchange for documents to present at the interview; and, in order to do that, obtain money that he’s owed by Emmanuel (Emmanuel Yovanie), a Cameroonian migrant from whom Souleymane rents a verified phone app account, in order to work as a food delivery courier – as an undocumented asylum seeker, Souleymane isn’t legally allowed to work. In Tori and Lokita, whose title characters are two African child migrants in Belgium, Lokita is expected to earn money to send back to her family in Cameroon. Souleymane has been trying to fund his unwell mother’s medication in Guinea-Conakry.
The two Dardenne films mentioned are set, like all the brothers’ work, in the bleakly post-industrial, economically depressed area of Seraing, near Liège – which makes for a third, and a surprising, connection with Souleymane’s Story: Paris on the cinema screen can seldom have looked less glamorous than it does here. Yet Boris Lojkine doesn’t overstress the grimness – his film travels too quickly for that. The tempo is dictated entirely by Souleymane, who’s usually urgently on the move. Lojkine’s cinematographer, Tristan Galand, follows Souleymane as he rides his bicycle from one job to the next: we see the Paris streets and roads ahead that the protagonist sees. Whenever the phone app demands an up-to-date selfie to verify a courier’s identity, Souleymane must find Emmanuel immediately. Once he’s finished work, very late in the evening, he runs for a Metro connection, then for a transit bus to the hostel where he’s booked a place for the night. It’s a different hostel on each of the two nights in question: on the second night, he misses the bus and spends the night in the stairwell of a nearby building.
Plenty of words are also delivered at speed. Travelling on his bike, Souleymane recites aloud details – dates, street names – in the invented story he’s trying to memorise for OFPRA about his political activism in Guinea. Between jobs, he may chat hurriedly with his genial compatriot Khalil (Younoussa Diallo) or with the Ivorian migrants they both know. Hectic, angry words are sometimes exchanged around the pick-up or drop-off of food deliveries. Putting Souleymane through his paces, exasperated, impatient Barry barks out rapid-fire instructions. At least until Souleymane’s asylum interview, the verbal tempo slows only in his occasional phone conversations with his nearest and dearest in Guinea – first with his mother, then twice with his girlfriend Kadiatou (Keita Dallo), who has received a marriage proposal from another man. The second of these, a FaceTime call, happens when Souleymane is sitting in the stairwell, already near the end of his tether. It’s a tender, poignant scene of mutually regretful farewell.
Plenty also goes wrong for Souleymane in the run-up to the interview. Late on the first evening, he collides with a car and comes off his bike. His next delivery is rejected by a customer because the bag has been damaged in the collision. His last delivery of the night is to a couple of uniformed police officers on duty: they accuse Souleymane of working illegally but are hungry enough not to take the matter further. The following night, after trying for hours to track down Emmanuel for the cash that he’s due, they finally confront each other in Emmanuel’s apartment block. Emmanuel has been temporarily locked out of his courier account because of a customer complaint about Souleymane – this is Emmanuel’s pretext for withholding most of the money. For good measure, he gets aggressive with Souleymane who, as a result, falls down some stairs and injures his face.
It’s also worth noting two things that don’t go wrong. Perhaps it’s only to be expected that Souleymane doesn’t get his bike nicked; if he did, the shadow of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) would loom too large in Souleymane’s Story. More remarkably, Souleymane’s mobile never dies. You can understand Lojkine taking the view that, if it did, his narrative might lose valuable momentum; even so, keeping the phone charged seems close to a miracle in Souleymane’s fraught circumstances. Worth noting too that none of the sans-papiers is sans mobile phone, though Lojkine does well to illustrate other gradations in the asylum seekers’ food chain – Khalil, for example, hasn’t got himself a bike, let alone a courier account.
This is a story in a hurry (the film runs only ninety-four minutes) yet Lojkine’s description of the cultural context doesn’t feel skimped. Souleymane and Kadiatou are Muslim; this prompts repeated invocations of Allah in the FaceTime, but Souleymane isn’t evidently a practising Muslim. The scenario is racially nuanced, too. Souleymane is as likely to encounter a friendly white person (an elderly man in a seventh-floor apartment) as an unfriendly one (a notably unpleasant restaurant manager – a cameo from Lokhine himself). The disputes between Africans may be good-humoured or dismaying: a jokey argument about the Guinea and Ivory Coast national soccer teams on the one hand, Emmanuel’s treatment of Souleymane on the other. The hero is also on the receiving ends of small acts of kindness, even though small is the operative word. A worker in a Chinese eatery where he picks up a delivery, offers Souleymane a sweet, checking first that he likes strawberry flavour. Street volunteers serving free tea or coffee to those who need it, are concerned to know if Souleymane has seen a doctor about his face wound. (He hasn’t, needless to say.)
There’s no privacy at Barry’s workplace: one asylum applicant can easily hear another’s story as Barry rehearses his clients. The woman whose turn it is before Souleymane’s tells of forced marriage and sexual abuse. We don’t know whether her story is true; we do know that Souleymane’s bogus account of his political activities and imprisonment for these entails a more demanding memory test, about the exact locations of street demonstrations and the internal structures of the Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea (UFDG), a political group of which Souleymane had barely heard before Barry briefed him (his documents for OFPRA will include a fake UFDG membership card). Souleymane admits to Barry that he’s just not a political animal.
By the time he’s called in by a member of OFPRA staff (Nina Meurisse), we know Souleymane’s script nearly as well as he does: as the interview proceeds, you may find yourself joining in, inside your head, with the lines he’s speaking. You want his story to work – even though you know it’s fabricated and even though you know it won’t work. His interviewer eventually tells him that she’s already heard exactly the story he’s telling from two other asylum seekers in recent days. She urges him to tell the truth, at which point Souleymane gets upset, and (we can safely assume) does just that. His mother has been mentally ill for most of her adult life and, for just as long, stigmatised as ‘a devil woman’. Souleymane wants to earn enough money in France to pay for her psychiatric treatment and long-term care. The OFPRA agent explains that the outcome of his application will be communicated in writing, that if unsuccessful Souleymane will have the right to appeal within a specified time. In the film’s closing shots, he simply stands in the street outside the OFPRA offices.
It’s the right ending, of course: a realist accepts that anything more hopeful would be phony. Yet you root so strongly for Souleymane that you want more for him than this. It’s fortunate that – as you may have suspected from the shared surname of the protagonist and the young man playing him – there’s an overlap between Souleymane Sangaré’s life story and Abou Sangaré’s. The latter was working as a car and truck mechanic in Amiens and had no prior acting experience when he won the part of Souleymane in Boris Lojkine’s open casting call. At the time, Sangaré, whose mother in Guinea suffers from epilepsy, had made three unsuccessful applications for asylum in France; a deportation order was pending. In January 2025, he was granted an official residence permit, valid for one year. By then, he had won an acting prize at Cannes, where Souleymane’s Story premiered in Un Certain Regard the previous May, and been named Best Actor in the European Film Awards.
A few weeks after his permit came through, he added the César for ‘Best Male Revelation’ to his awards tally. That was one of four Césars won by Souleymane’s Story – along with Supporting Actress (Nina Meurisse), Original Screenplay and Film Editing (Xavier Sirven) – and all were well deserved. Nina Meurisse is admirable as the interviewer. The woman seems to be going through the motions at first but turns out to be more sympathetic than expected – yet truthfully so: whatever the extent of her sympathy, she knows to maintain a professional impartiality and distance.
Abou Sangaré is outstanding. I would usually have reservations about the depth of talent and acting potential of a first-time performer who is, at least to some extent, playing himself. But this young man – born in 2001 (so two years younger than his character) – is quite something. He’s in every single scene of the film and never strikes a false note, however close the camera’s scrutiny. His Souleymane is much more than a victim of circumstance – intensely likeable, radiating sympathy so naturally when he asks the old man on the seventh floor if he needs help cutting his pizza. Sangaré is equally good at rueful irony, in Souleymane’s comments about his love rival in the FaceTime with Kadiatou. According to an article that appeared in Le Monde in March 2026, he’s still working as a mechanic in Amiens and hasn’t yet been granted permanent residency in France. Here’s hoping that this soon comes through and, with due respect to his day job (respect that Sangaré clearly has, from what he tells Le Monde), that his future career is in screen acting. The César that he won was not only merited but also in just the right category. Abou Sangaré truly is a revelation.
9 June 2026