{"id":1428,"date":"2025-03-31T09:25:55","date_gmt":"2025-03-31T14:25:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/?p=1428"},"modified":"2025-03-31T09:25:55","modified_gmt":"2025-03-31T14:25:55","slug":"souleymanes-story-thursday-april-3rd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/31\/souleymanes-story-thursday-april-3rd\/","title":{"rendered":"Souleymane&#8217;s Story. Thursday, April 3rd."},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;\"><iframe src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/1071050992?badge=0&amp;autopause=0&amp;player_id=0&amp;app_id=58479\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write; encrypted-media\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" title=\"Small Things Like These (2024) trailer\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p><script src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/api\/player.js\"><\/script><\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Original Title: L&#8217;histoire de Souleymane<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Color \/ French, Fulah, and Malinka Languages \/ English Subtitles \/ MPA rating: Not rated \/ Runtime: 93 min<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s not only because of its similar time frame that Boris Lojkine\u2018s hurtling, headlong social-issues drama \u201cSouleymane\u2019s Story\u201d recalls \u201cTwo Days, One Night\u201d by the Dardenne brothers. Lojkine\u2019s film, which was awarded the jury prize and a well-deserved best actor award in the Un Certain Regard competition in Cannes, is similarly invested in its electrifying lead \u2014 non-professional Abou Sangare, making an unforgettably persuasive and poignant debut \u2014 and similarly effective in maintaining a level of urgency and high-stakes personal peril that few genre thrillers can muster. If the hero\u2019s dire situation is a ticking clock, Lojkine\u2019s intelligent and empathetic film places us right alongside him, with each cog of circumstance and each gear of good fortune grinding against him at every turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Souleymane (Sangare) is a recent arrival in Paris from Guinea, who sleeps in homeless shelters at night and works as a delivery biker by day using a \u201cborrowed\u201d account for which he pays a hefty cut of his earnings to the real owner, Emmanuel (Emmanuel Yovanie). It is a hard, physically demanding existence, lived in the teeth of a daily litany of deadlines, not only the countdowns on the constantly-dinging app, but metro timetables, documentation appointments and the unforgiving bus schedule. And that\u2019s just on a good day when he hasn\u2019t had to scoot across town to find Emmanuel to face-verify one of the app\u2019s random authentication checks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Still, even within his unenvied community of fellow asylum-seekers and unhoused strivers, Souleymane \u2014 good-natured, hardworking and handsome \u2014 has made an impression. \u201cSouleymane of Paris!\u201d his friends call out as he whizzes past them on the street, like he\u2019s an aristocrat touring his lands on two wheels, rather than an undocumented gig worker keeping a largely dismissive Parisian middle class in pad thai and pizzas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In two days\u2019 time, Souleymane will sit a make-or-break interview with OFPRA, the French governmental agency that deals with immigrant issues. In the meantime, he is paying a broker, Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow) to help him get his papers in order and to advise him on the process. Barry insists that Souleymane\u2019s real asylum story is not enough to sway the OFPRA committee, and provides him with a juiced-up, politicized script, involving torture and imprisonment, to recite instead. \u201cI don\u2019t want to lie,\u201d says Souleymane, but laboriously commits these new details to memory anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In order to pay Barry, Souleymane works every spare second he can, soldiering on even when a collision with a car injures him and damages his precious bicycle. Even then, his employment is precarious. Not only does he have to get Emmanuel to release his earnings to him, but like all couriers, he is subject to star-ratings and the complaints reporting process \u2014 a system set up exclusively to protect the user and the company at the expense of the expendable riders. Aside from everything else, \u201cThe Story of Souleymane\u201d works as an admonition to those of us who use food delivery apps: Short of your Uber Eats courier breaking into your house and murdering your entire family, never, ever complain to the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Lojkine\u2019s taut, honed screenplay, co-written by Delphine Agut (\u201cInshallah a Boy\u201d), coupled with Tristan Galand\u2019s unobtrusively elegant yet dynamic camerawork and the pacy energy of Xavier Sirven\u2019s editing, make the film a far smoother, better oiled vehicle than Souleymane\u2019s scraping bike. But the formal mechanics are most impressive in how they understand that their purpose is supportive, to be there to give structure to the showcase of Sangare\u2019s extraordinary performance. Initially embodying a rangy, street-level physicality, Sangare is magnetic, but as Souleymane\u2019s psychology is more deeply explored, there appears to be no limit to how much soul and sensitivity the actor can bring to a character who could easily have ended up a thin collection of \u201cgood immigrant\u201d tropes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In a showstopping climax \u2014 a gripping scene between Sangare and Nina Meurisse, playing the perfectly efficient but not unsympathetic face of French immigration bureaucracy \u2014 all the motion and confrontation of the last couple of days is funneled into one extended close-up monologue. The ticking clocks are momentarily stilled. All breaths are held. And the film\u2019s real conflict comes into focus: the internal battle between the truth and the expedient lie, between Souleymane\u2019s conscience and his counsel, between the devil and the deep blue sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Review by Jessica Kiang for Variety<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt32086046\/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"44\" height=\"20\" src=\"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/imdb.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-43\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Original Title: L&#8217;histoire de Souleymane Color \/ French, Fulah, and Malinka Languages \/ English Subtitles \/ MPA rating: Not rated \/ Runtime: 93 min It\u2019s not only because of its similar time frame that Boris Lojkine\u2018s hurtling, headlong social-issues drama \u201cSouleymane\u2019s Story\u201d recalls \u201cTwo Days, One Night\u201d by the Dardenne brothers. Lojkine\u2019s film, which was &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/31\/souleymanes-story-thursday-april-3rd\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Souleymane&#8217;s Story. Thursday, April 3rd.<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1429,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-trailers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1430,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions\/1430"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newscreen.richardlohr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}