ABOU SANGARÉ

BORIS LOJKINE: SOULEYMANE'S STORY/L'HISTOIRE DE SOULEYMANE (2024) R-V

TRAILER

An African immigrant's struggle in Paris

This film is above all the story, ripped from the headlines but intensely and richly fleshed out, of the plight of an African emigrant (Souleymane from Guinea) who has gotten to Paris and is awaiting an immigration interview with great nervous uncertaintty. This interview, which will determine his future, is coming for Souleymane in two days, and the film runs up until he walks - or staggers - out of it. This format nods to Cristian Mungiu’s 2007 Cannes winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days as well as the Dardennnes' Two Days, One Night. It also fits into a small but memorable recent genre, the food delivery saga. Of the latter I have previously reviewed two, the 2003 Sean Baker and Tsou Shih-Ching docu-feature Take Out (2003) and Taku Aoyagi's 2021 Tokyo Uber Blues, a wearying tour de force in which the cinematographer-editor is also the Uber Eats toiler, filming himself.

Boris Lojkine is juggling many balls here, and creating his own cinéma vérité using actual people of the street and mostly black men in those strets and in homeless shelters where Souleymane goes to sleep for the night. We get a glimpse of the Uber Eats form of exploitation, as we did in Taku Aoyagi's's film, where it's possible, as two men who advise Soulaymane show, just like two who advised Aoyagi, that there are strategies the beginner is ignorant of for making more money by going to sources that are faster and more reliable. On the other hand, Sean Baker's early piece focuses on old school New York restaurant delivery boys, simple back and forth drudgery before apps and electronics made everything faster and more complicated.

For Suleymane life is a complicated non-stop challenge. Besides his difficulty negotiating the food delivery job, which he's failing at every day - he makes too little, has an accident, and eventually altogether loses the account he has been renting from a duplicitous person, there are also the matters of his housing and money difficulties weighing him down. But above all that, he is trying to buy documents from an unreliable street agent and, when we first meet him, taking lessons about how to present himself at the imigration asylum interview.

The latter is the crux of the matter. It turns out he has been memorizing a story to impersonate a political refugee, and thereby get greater preference than a merely personal one who has come not to escape danger but to find a better life.

Abou Sangaré here is "making an unforgettably persuasive and poignant debut," wrote Jessica Kiang in her Variety review. The drama is "propulsive" and "compassionate." It is also wearying, ambiguous, and rather depressing, like the granddaddhy of all such films, Roberto Rossellini's 1948 Ladri di biciclette or Bicycle Thieves. Only this time, the system may be more sympathetic and more savvy, and the refugee, a young man with boundless energy, is in touch with his mother and his fiancee in Guinea, and the many African and other black people on the streets and borders of Paris provide a different landscape of a global refugee crisis that is only going to grow in the future. I provided links to some of my reviews of films related to the refugee cris in my review of Megan Mylan's Simple As Water.. There is no question that Abou Sangaré recreates the plight of this man with unforgettable presence and energy.

Souleymane's Story/Histoire de Souleyman, 94 mins., debuted at Cannes Un Certain Regard May 19, 2024, receiving the Jury Prize and the Best Actor Award for newcomer Abou Sangaré. It has showings also at Karlovy Vary, Jerusalem, Reykjavík, Toronto, Leiden, Thessaloniki, Stockholm, Taipei and other international festivals. The French theatrical release was Oct. 9, 2024, with subsequent AlloCiné ratings of 4.1 (82%) press and 4.2 (84%) spectators. (A series high score.) It was screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln center, NYC.
Showing:
Sunday, March 9 at 1:00pm – Introduction by producer Bruno Nahon
Friday, March 14 at 4:00pm

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.