Set in Paris, director Boris Lojkine’s newest movie follows Souleymane (an astonishing flip from Abou Sangaré), in search of asylum in France as an immigrant from Guinea. Via Souleymane’s eyes, Paris turns into a gritty, unforgiving panorama of risk, fragility and constant paperwork.
First-time actor Sangaré received best possible actor in Un Sure Regard on the 2024 Cannes Movie Pageant, and the 2025 maximum promising actor César (the French similar of the Oscars) for the function. Within the opening moments of the movie, it turns into transparent why.
The primary scene follows Souleymane right into a ready room. Apprehensive and worrying, he captures the target audience’s consideration with only some gestures and fleeting expressions. Sangaré’s efficiency is uncooked but remarkably restrained, suffused with the type of vulnerability that makes it not possible to appear away.
The tale then jumps again to the times main as much as this second, later published to be Souleymane’s interview with the French executive division that offers with immigration.
Souleymane works as a bicycle supply driving force within the town. As he has but to obtain his paintings allow, he’s compelled to hire his driving force’s app account from an acquaintance, Emmanuel (Emmanuel Yovanie), who calls for a big portion of his profits.
This association turns into a continuing supply of anxiety. Every time the app calls for a selfie to make sure the driving force’s identification, Souleymane will have to race to Emmanuel for this photograph. What will have to be a easy act of labor turns right into a day by day negotiation with era, paperwork and worry. Via those moments, the movie exposes simply how precarious and punishing it’s to earn cash with out criminal popularity.
Souleymane’s Tale rejects the “good immigrant” trope, which is able to characterise immigrants as saintly and non-threatening. As a substitute, Souleymane is a fancy, absolutely realised personality.
In his bid for asylum, he fabricates components of his tale, an act that weighs closely on him. Unaccustomed to deceit, he struggles to stay his tale instantly, his faltering reminiscence exposing each his honesty and exhaustion. Those moments are quietly devastating, revealing the emotional toll of getting to form your lifestyles into one thing applicable to the device.
As Souleymane rushes thru Parisian visitors, the digital camera is intimate and unrelenting. Each and every swerve and each and every close to pass over with visitors is stuffed with pressure and exposes Souleymane’s vulnerability. Naturalistic performances, ambient sounds and muted gentle mix to create one thing wholly lived-in, virtually documentary in texture.
Whilst revered amongst his fellow asylum seekers and supply drivers, time and again Souleymane is met with hostility from eating place homeowners and consumers. Via those encounters, the movie lays naked the tough unregulated international of gig-economy labour, the place human price is diminished to hurry, scores and availability.
Souleymane struggles with relentless paperwork.
Conic Movie
Regardless of its bleakness, this movie has a placing vibrancy. Souleymane strikes continuously during the town, throughout bridges, thru underpasses, down crowded boulevards. Paris is a residing, respiring, moving presence, alternately gorgeous and brutal. The rhythm of his motion offers the tale its pulse, a visible and emotional power which captures each the isolation and the momentum of survival.
With an unflinching portrayal of recent paperwork, Souleymane’s Tale exposes how fragile lifestyles turns into when each and every resolution that governs it’s made through an set of rules or an overworked legitimate.
This can be a query which feels particularly pressing in 2025, a yr outlined through deepening divides over migration, precarious paintings and belonging. With out ever turning didactic, the movie captures the quiet devastation of the ones stuck within the equipment of recent methods, making it each a private tragedy and a reflect held as much as the days. That is cinema that confronts: humane, politically astute and hauntingly actual.
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