An immigrant struggling in a harsh new Western country is one of the pillars of the genre “Africa in Big Festival”. Cannes has Boris Lojkine’s The Story of Souleymane as its representative for 2024. It’s hardly surprising that the film comes with the genre’s usual clichés—black sorrows, tears, and blood. And yet, Lojkine manages to surpass the limitations of this growing corpus.
For that, viewers can thank Xavier Sirven’s wonderfully brisk editing, Lojkine’s storytelling structure, and, above all, the ultra-credible lead performance of newcomer Abou Sangare. The actor’s cheekbones, presence, and ostensibly unpolished expressions all seem primed for the screen.
Without what this actor presents onscreen (aided by Lojkine and Delphine Agut’s deft screenwriting), this is a film that would fail, because so many of its elements are familiar. There’s the good immigrant, unreasonable white man, genial migrant community, and tearjerking exposition. But The Story of Souleymane is more than its individual parts. Scenes fly by, prompted by the move-move-move! ethos of the hustling immigrant. This is a film told close in close quarters. On several occasions, the camera is so close to our hero that you can smell the desperation coming off his skin, which, as richly and darkly lensed by Tristan Galand, is mutedly lustrous.
As the tale begins, we see the titular delivery man, originally from Guinea, hopping around Paris, ferrying food to customers ordering via a mobile app. Nothing about the job is strange in today’s world, but the peculiarity of Souleymane’s hustle is clear when we see what he does when his app requires a selfie to complete an order. He should simply raise the screen to his face as everyone does. Instead, he gets on his bike for several minutes to present his phone to another man. This man puts the phone to his face; it works. Clearly, the delivery app’s account isn’t Souleymane’s.
This scene serves as a skillful introduction to this other character, who will become important to the tale being told. It also shows the direness of Souleymane’s position. Apparently, his stay in France is reliant on the kindness and the business of others. He has a place to sleep on certain nights because of an organisation catering to the homeless. But the revenue he gets from using another man’s food delivery app will be split with the actual owner of the account. His immigration status in this new country excludes employment, so Souleymane is a digital tenant in this other man’s building.
That can only change if Souleymane passes an interview with the French government. For that, he needs to memorise a few lies about his life before coming to France. He also needs to pay for documents that would lend credence to his lies. For both of those things, he needs a coach who demands payment for his services.
The entire film is wrapped around this all-important interview, which is a marked difference from Lojkine’s previous picture Hope and, say, Io Capitano, Italy’s submission for the 2024 Oscars and 2023’s most successful film in the Africa in Big Festival genre. Where the Matteo Garrone film traced an immigrant’s journey from an impoverished Africa to a prosperous Europe, The Story of Souleymane is about the second half of the story: What happens when the immigrant has played and won that dangerous game of crossing over?
For Souleymane, what happens is a struggle to earn a living in a system that doesn’t exactly want the immigrant to thrive on the same level as the white people he meets. But the situation is more of an indictment of successive African governments, which have made living in a Western country that doesn’t want you continue to be coveted by many Africans. As our hero explains in one of the film’s two very moving scenes, he tried but just couldn’t make things work in his country.
Both The Story of Souleymane and Io Capitano are directed by Europeans who do not have the experiences they are presenting to viewers. Which, in today’s culture landscape, is derided by certain people. But when a filmmaker makes a film that works as well as this one does, commentary of that sort is moot. And when he is able to direct Sangare, who hasn’t worked as an actor before, in those two very moving scenes—one in which he sheds tears and another, the climactic scene, in which he fights back tears—even the most strident politically correct detractor has to admit that Lojkine and crew have gotten things cinematically right.
One can only hope that African filmmakers, those who uphold the struggling immigrant pillar in the Africa in Big Festival genre, will make work as engaging and moving as this one. Indeed, Nabil Ayouch, who is African, has a film in Cannes around the same idea of the oppressed in a stifling society. His is titled Everybody Loves Touda. Lojkine’s film is the stronger of the two. And it would be highly deserving if The Story of Souleymane leaves the Un Certain Regard section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival with an award.
Director: Boris Lojkine
Screenplay: Delphine Agut, Boris Lojkine
Cast: Abou Sangare, Nina Meurisse, Alpha Oumar Sow, Emmanuel Yovanie, Emmanuel Yovanie, Younoussa Diallo
Producers: Bruno Nahon
Cinematography: Tristan Galand
Editing: Xavier Sirven
Sound: Marc-Olivier Brulle
Production Company: UNITÉ
World Sales: Pyramide International
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
In French
92 minutes
