Racing through the streets of Paris making food deliveries on his bicycle, Guinean immigrant Souleymane (Abou Sangare) is struggling to stay afloat. In two days, he has to report for an asylum application interview, where he must plead his case to an immigration officer (Nina Meurisse) who will determine his future in France. As he rides, he repeats his story. But Souleymane is not ready. Drawing inspiration from Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and evoking the humanist films of the Dardennes, Boris Lojkine’s urgent, propulsive third feature never leaves Souleymane’s side in a deeply affecting account of the daily trials and uncertain futures faced by migrants in France and around the world.
“The best discovery of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Souleymane’s Story delivers a political fable with all the grit and urgency of a thriller.” – Rory O’Connor, The Film Stage
“Sangare is magnetic…there appears to be no limit to how much soul and sensitivity the actor can bring.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety
The film’s amazing lead, Abou Sangare, was an auto mechanic before filming Souleymane, not an actor. Nevertheless, he went on to win the Un Certain Regard Best Actor prize at Cannes last year as well as the César Award for Best Male Revelation. Lojkine’s wrote about the casting and rehearsal process:
“Almost all the actors in the film are non-professionals with no acting experience. With Aline Dalbis, we did a long open casting call, wandering in the streets of Paris to meet food deliverers. We immersed ourselves in the Guinean community, and it was finally in
Amiens, through an association, that we met 23-year-old Abou Sangare, who had arrived in France seven years earlier, when he was still a minor. His face, his words, the intensity of his presence in front of the camera immediately stroke us. It was him.
“Over a period of several months, we had many rehearsal sessions with Sangare (Guineans usually call each other by their surnames rather than their first names), and then with the other actors. Sangare had a huge weight on his shoulders. He is in every scene, almost every shot. In real life, he is a mechanic, not a delivery boy. For several weeks, he did delivery work, to familiarize himself with everyday gestures, the bike, the phone, the app, the bag, the way to introduce himself to customers and restaurant staff. Little by little, he got into character. This rehearsal time allowed the actors to prepare themselves. It also allowed me to rewrite the script, adapting it to their unique ways of speaking and to details about them. This is what I like about working with non-professional actors: they come as they are, carrying their own world with them. It is up to me to welcome their singularity.
“During the forty days of shooting, Sangare blew us all away. Sometimes breathtakingly beautiful, with a changing, highly expressive face, showing a whole range of emotions, he was always convincing, and often deeply moving.”
If, like Greg Laemmle and me, you are fan of urban cycling, you’ll appreciate bicycles’ place in the film. The director wrote about this as well:
“For me, the cycling scenes are much more than mere rides. On a bike, you are immediately immersed in the chaos of the city. During these intense scenes, we get to feel its intensity, absorb its energy, and have a constant sense of danger. To film Souleymane’s bike we used other bikes. It was the only way for us to slip into the traffic.
“One bike for the image, another for the sound. Most of the time, I rode the sound bike myself, to stay fully engaged in the shooting. I wanted to keep the shooting device light, so as to slip into the city without interrupting its bustling life. To imbed the cinematic device in reality. And bring as much reality as possible into fiction. I even wanted the complex dialogue scenes to be set at the heart of city life: in the train, in the middle of traffic, in a crowd, in the heart of the bubbling cauldron. My sound engineer (Marc-Olivier Brullé, with whom I worked for the third time) had to invent new ways to record sound, to meet the challenges of shooting in the midst of the city’s hustle and
bustle.
“It was also a challenge in terms of location management. Apart from the accident scene, we never blocked the streets. We made do with the pedestrians and cars coming and going… It allowed us to give a strong sense of the intense, chaotic and suffocating presence of the city, to immerse the viewer in reality while using all the resources of cinema and fiction.”