Souleyman pedals for his life on the streets of Paris

Daniel Nelson

It begins in an asylum assessment office in Paris and ends with an intense asylum interview that takes an unexpected turn.

The film’s opening and closing scenes bookend 48 hours in Souleymane’s Story, as the Guinean fast food courier desperately tries to stop his life sliding out of control.

He’s up against it, operating in the underbelly of society. Life revolves around debts, documents, phones, bikes. The camera follows him as he pedals furiously across town from one delivery to the next, weaving in and out of the traffic, races to catch last trains and buses in order to get to a night dormitory, clashes with a restaurateur for whom he is disposable, maintains a rented app that occasionally requires him to pedal back across Paris to verify the real owner’s photo, or is hassled by newly arrived migrants needing help.

While struggling to survive he finds rare quiet moments to call home to talk to his ailing mother and wavering girlfriend. The news is not good. The calls increase his despondency. Painful reminders of his life and hopes in Guinea.

And pressing ever closer and harder is his forthcoming asylum interview, for which he is coached by a broker who insists that he learns a fictional backstory about political involvement in Guinea that he doesn’t really understand. He comes to realise that the story he must learn and recite will not stand up to official scrutiny.

This is not a heavy, slow picture of a life unravelling. It’s filmed at breathless pace. You feel you are on the spot, on Souleymane’s shoulder as he bustles through the streets and juggles the strands of his life. The sequence of events is unrelenting, the problems incessant and though Souleyman is immensely likeable and capable you gradually sense that his life has become unmoored by circumstance (“I don’t know why I came to France”).

Souleymane is on screen virtually the entire time. He is played by Abou Sangaré, who like most of the characters in the film. is not a trained actor. He is an actor now, and he’s superb.

Director Boris Lojkine has said he wanted to make a film “closer to a thriller than to a social chronicle”. He has succeeded.

+ Souleymane’s Story is showing at Rich Mix on 13 October, at the ICA in The Mall on 17-23 October and at Cine Lumiere on 17-25 October