Film

Abou Sangaré drew from his own life as a young man seeking a better life in France for his lead role in The Story of Souleymane, which opens in Australia this week. By Philippa Hawker.

Actor Abou Sangaré is the real deal

Actor Abou Sangaré.

Credit: Marie Rouge / Unifrance

At the Cannes Film Festival last year, Abou Sangaré should have been on top of the world. He had won a best actor award for his role in L’Histoire de Souleymane (The Story of Souleymane), the gripping tale of an asylum seeker, which had been selected for the Un Certain Regard section and also took out the jury and critics’ prizes.

While he was there, however, he learnt that his application for a residency permit in France had been turned down. Not until January this year, a matter of days before our conversation, was he notified that he had finally been granted a permit. He looks as if he still can’t quite believe it.

The Story of Souleymane, directed and co-written by Boris Lojkine, will be released in Australia on June 26. It takes us through two days in the life of a young man who is about to have a crucial interview in which his application for asylum will be assessed. It was a situation Sangaré knew all too well at the time. “It’s the story of everyone without papers in Europe, in the whole world.”

The film has the tension, suspense and headlong rush of a thriller, but it also creates a sense of intimacy and proximity, of the complexity of a character and a life.

Sangaré plays Souleymane, whose life is teetering on the edge. He works for a food delivery business, racing around Paris on his bicycle to pick up and deliver meals. He can access various support services, including a homeless shelter where he can spend the night, but he can’t legally hold down a job. So he “rents” the identity of someone who is registered with the delivery business and depends on this man to pass on to him the money he has earnt, minus the rent.

His phone keeps him in some sort of touch with his mother and his girlfriend back in Guinea, but it’s unsatisfying and rushed. Souleymane is forever on the clock. He has to register for the homeless shelter and catch the 10pm bus from the Gare du Nord to get there in time, as well as chase up the money he’s earnt. Along the way, he experiences moments of kindness and human contact – a free coffee, a brief conversation with a frail elderly client – but also pressure, impatience, exploitation on all sides, the unwelcome attention of the police, the fear of losing his job, the constant uncertainty.

He also needs money to pay a broker who gives him advice and supporting documents for his application. He has been persuaded by others in the Guinean community that he needs to beef up his reasons for seeking asylum. He is made to feel that his own story is not enough. Everywhere he goes, he rehearses the lines he has been fed, practising the script that will present him as a worthy candidate, a political activist under threat.

It’s another layer of anxiety on top of the pressure he feels every day, leading up to the crucial interview. For Lojkine, the lie is important, in both dramatic and political terms. It reflects the demands faced by the undocumented to conform to deserving stereotypes, the lack of confidence that asylum seekers have in their own identity and value.

Making the film in this way and with this emphasis brought certain pressures. Almost all the actors are non-professionals and the movie was made on a shoestring budget and shot on the fly. There was only one scene, involving an accident, where they blocked off a street; otherwise the outdoor scenes were shot with a minimal crew. The camera followed Sangaré on his bicycle, dodging traffic, rushing from restaurant to apartment block to another restaurant, pedalling frantically to catch the train at the last possible minute.

In these scenes Sangaré has the kinetic energy and urgency of a man possessed, but the film also explores his inner life. There are scenes that take us deep into his state of mind. It is a rich, devastating performance, full of nuance and delicacy.

Sangaré was born in Sinke, in the south-east of Guinea, in 2001. He left the country at the age of 15. His mother was seriously ill and he felt that his best chance of supporting her was to go to a country where he could earn money to send back to her. He travelled by way of Mali, Algeria and Libya, often in gruelling circumstances, before reaching Italy.

When he finally arrived in France, he went first to Paris but did not stay there. He has described several times how it happened: he had a friendly conversation in a cafe with a man who told him that he might have better opportunities and less trouble with authorities outside Paris, and advised him to go to a smaller town. The man mentioned Lille, but when Sangaré went by Metro to the Gare du Nord, he didn’t have enough money to buy the ticket. He followed some people on the platform and ended up in Amiens, 120 kilometres north, halfway between Paris and Lille.

There he found systems of support, both legal and educational. His childhood dream was to be a mechanic and he was able to study at high school and receive a mechanic’s certificate. He had an offer for a full-time job at a garage once he received his residency permit. Sangaré applied for consideration as a minor, a different category from the one Souleymane is seeking. In an interview with Libération newspaper last year, he talked about the importance of Amiens and the community he found there, benevolent associations, teachers and colleagues who supported him when the government turned down his application.

He remained hopeful that he would get the garage job. Acting, Sangaré says, was the last thing he had ever imagined doing. When Lojkine and his team came to talk to asylum seekers and people who might be suitable cast members, his first concern was the legality of the situation. “I asked lots of questions. How will it happen, I wanted to know,” Sangaré says. “I was scared at a political level because I didn’t want to have any issues with papers, so I asked, ‘How will we work?’ And they said, ‘Everything is perfectly legal; if you have your social security number, you will be okay.’ ”

Lojkine, a philosophy teacher turned documentary filmmaker, has made two previous features dealing with issues of migration and civil war. For his first to be shot in France, he always knew that he wanted to cast non-professionals, including those who were undocumented. His producers took some convincing, he says. He consulted a theatre company with experience of working in similar circumstances that had found a way to operate within the law. “They told me they were doing some shows with migrants and paying them legally and they were declaring it to the authorities, so I said, ‘If they can do that, we can do it, too.’ ”

Souleymane is on screen for the entire movie: everything hinges on that performance. Lojkine looked long and hard for the right actor. When he couldn’t find someone in Paris, he searched further afield. He says it’s not easy to describe what he saw in Sangaré, “but it’s something that the camera knows”. It’s also about a quality that doesn’t necessarily announce itself ostentatiously.

“I remember the moment I made the decision; it was after a small improvisation, where he was silent,” says Lojkine. “It was a moment when he was playing opposite another non-actor. And the situation” – not a scene from the film – “was that he’d just got an answer from the administration and he is sad.

“His friend said, ‘Come, we will go out, it’s good for you.’ And he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t want to speak, he just remains silent. This silence was so intense, there was something cinematic about it, something I can’t explain.” It was enough to persuade him that he had found his actor.

Sangaré might have aspects in common with his character, but there were certain things about which he had no idea. “I’d never been a delivery man and I’d never lived in Paris. I didn’t know it at all,” he says. “So when I was hired for this project, Boris asked me to do two weeks of delivery work because it had to seem absolutely natural, I had to understand all about it.” He worked with Mamadou Barry, who had done food delivery and who appears in the film in a scene in which he and Souleymane do their laundry together. Lojkine himself appears briefly in the film as an impatient restaurateur who becomes involved in a confrontation with Souleymane.

After the two weeks of delivery research, there were two months of rehearsals. Certain scenes display Sangaré’s range and emotional directness, including a moving conversation Souleymane has with his girlfriend in Guinea. Sangaré and Keita Diallo, who plays his girlfriend, Kadiatou, rehearsed together for several days before they shot the scene. They worked on creating shared memories of the time Souleymane and Kadiatou spent together, imagining shared experiences such as trips to the beach.

He didn’t draw on his own direct experience, Sangaré says, but he understood what it was all about. “These conversations are real. I know people who have been through this,” he says. “They want to come here and make money and help back home, but then they realise that they can’t, and the poor girl is waiting. It is so traumatic.”

In early 2025, The Story of Souleymane was up for eight awards at the Césars, France’s Oscars, including best film and best director, as well as a nomination for Sangaré for best new male talent. At the ceremony in February, it won for best editing and original screenplay, as well as best supporting actor for Nina Meurisse, who plays a government bureaucrat interviewing Souleymane. Sangaré took out the best new male talent.

At that moment, Sangaré knew he had gained the right to stay in France. It was an award he felt able to enjoy at last. The real prize, he says, was his residency permit: it is not permanent, but it is a start.

His acceptance speech is full of barely contained emotion but is carefully thought out and detailed. He thanks Lojkine and the film’s casting director, Aline Dalbus, because meeting those two people changed his life. “From 2017 until April 2023 I had almost no life,” he says, “I didn’t consider myself to be a human being.” As the play-off music swells, he makes a quick gesture for more time, thanking “my friends at Amiens, who from 2017 to 2023 accompanied me, and the garage that gave me a real motivation to stay”.

After his remarkable debut, it is hard to believe that he won’t do more. When asked about the possibilities of making more films, he is noncommittal. “I don’t have a dream of cinema,” he says, “but if the opportunity presented itself to do something like The Story of Souleymane, I would think about it. I love cinema, it gave me a new life. But I’ll have to be back at the garage on Monday.”

Sangaré has an agent, Marie Prouzet, who says that there are things on the horizon. “Sangaré has several film projects but nothing I can confirm yet, it’s all confidential at the moment,” she says. In the meantime, “he is still living in Amiens and still working as a mechanic”.

Philippa Hawker travelled to Paris with the assistance of Unifrance.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 21, 2025 as "The real deal".

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