Souleymane's Story
2024 · Boris Lojkine
For when you want a film that grips like a chase movie but leaves you thinking about the real world — the delivery riders you pass every day. Challenging, urgent, and worth the discomfort.
What it's about
Souleymane, a young Guinean immigrant, pedals food deliveries through Paris traffic under someone else's courier account, sleeping wherever the city's emergency system has a bed. In two days he faces his asylum interview — the single conversation that will decide his future — and he spends every spare moment rehearsing the story he's supposed to tell, a story that keeps slipping away from the truth.
The experience
It plays like a thriller even though the stakes are a form and an interview — breathless, handheld, no wasted minute, with the constant low hum of an app dictating a man's life. Exhausting in the best sense, and deeply moving.
Performances
Abou Sangaré, a non-professional mechanic whose own residency status was unresolved during filming, is extraordinary — so unguarded and precise he won the Un Certain Regard acting prize at Cannes and the César for the role.
The craft
Boris Lojkine shoots in a propulsive vérité register — handheld camera weaving through actual Parisian streets, the gig economy's phone-app tyranny rendered with procedural exactness. The sound of traffic, notifications, and breath does as much work as any score; see it somewhere you can't check your phone.
Why it matters
A Jury Prize winner in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2024, it became one of the defining recent films about Europe's asylum system and gig-economy underclass, told from inside rather than about.
Reception & legacy: how Souleymane's Story was received, argued over, and remembered →
Two days in the life of a Guinean bike courier in Paris, pedaling meals through traffic while rehearsing the story he must tell at his asylum interview — the single conversation that will decide everything. Boris Lojkine, a former philosophy lecturer who turned to filmmaking with documentaries shot in Vietnam and the fiction feature Hope, works here in a vérité register so propulsive the film plays like a thriller: handheld camera weaving through actual Parisian streets, the gig economy's phone-app tyranny rendered with procedural exactness. The Dardenne comparison is earned, but Lojkine's real coup is Abou Sangaré, a non-professional mechanic from Amiens whose own residency status was unresolved during production; he won the Un Certain Regard acting prize at Cannes 2024, where the film also took the Jury Prize, and the César for most promising actor. Everything funnels toward a climactic interview staged as a patient, devastating two-hander across a desk — one of the great extended dialogue scenes of recent European cinema, built almost entirely on a face deciding what the truth is worth.
Lines of influence
- Bicycle Thieves (1948) — Sets the neorealist template the film runs on: a non-professional lead traversing a city over a compressed span, chasing the one thing his survival depends on, with the street itself as set and antagonist.
- Pickpocket (1959) — The Dardenne-line source for its performance grammar — a 'model' non-actor whose impassive face and working hands in tight closeup carry the drama, and a thriller built from small furtive gestures rather than dialogue.
- La Promesse (1996) — Direct parent: undocumented-migrant labor and moral debt shot in restless handheld vérité, the camera bound to a protagonist forced into complicity by economic precarity.
- Rosetta (1999) — The stylistic blueprint — handheld camera pinned to the back of a young protagonist's neck as she desperately hunts legitimate work, turning the pursuit of a job into breathless kinetic suspense.
- Two Days, One Night (2014) — The seed's compressed two-day ticking-clock structure lifts directly from this: a protagonist making a deadline-bound round of encounters, each a tense two-hander that must be 'won' before time runs out.
- 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) — Model for the single-crisis-day thriller: real-time dread built in long handheld takes as an ordinary person navigates a bureaucratic ordeal that could destroy them, climaxing in an unbearable negotiation across a table.
- The Class (2008) — Pioneers the method the seed uses — casting non-professionals close to their real lives and workshopping extended, overlapping vérité dialogue scenes, then framing the whole as a Cannes-honored two-hander institutional confrontation.
- Sorry We Missed You (2019) — The closest cousin on gig-economy craft: a delivery worker tethered to a handheld scanner/app whose algorithm dictates his day, dramatizing precarity-by-interface exactly as the seed does with its rider app.
- I, Daniel Blake (2016) — Builds its drama around the bureaucratic assessment interview as narrative engine — the applicant across a desk from a functionary — the same climactic-interview device that structures the seed.
- The Measure of a Man (2015) — Uses the job/appraisal interview as recurring formal device, shooting Vincent Lindon in unbroken vérité two-handers where the protagonist's dignity is litigated in real time across a table.
- Dheepan (2015) — Cannes-honored migration thriller whose asylum seeker survives by fabricating an identity and papers, tipping social-realism into genre suspense the same way the seed hangs a thriller on an asylum claim.
- Hope (2014) — Lojkine's own prior migration film establishing his method: immersive vérité fieldwork with non-professional leads playing versions of their journeys, the sub-Saharan-to-Europe route rendered as intimate handheld ordeal.
- Camille (2019) — Continues his authorship — docufiction hybrid shot on location with locals, blurring reportage and drama, the same immersion he brings to the Paris courier milieu of the seed.
- Io Capitano (2023) — Contemporary migration companion cast with real migrants and shot along the actual route, dramatizing the West-African-to-Europe passage as first-person survival thriller with a non-professional face at its center.
- Atlantics (2019) — Shares the non-professional lead and the migration-and-labor economy told from the departure end, using face-in-closeup and location vérité to register precarity rather than spectacle.