{"id":82009,"date":"2025-10-15T11:01:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T11:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/82009\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T11:01:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T11:01:09","slug":"a-powerful-and-moving-chronicle-of-life-on-the-margins-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/82009\/","title":{"rendered":"A powerful and moving chronicle of life on the margins \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Souleymane\u2019s Story <\/p>\n

\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 <\/p>\n

Director: Boris Lojkine <\/p>\n

Cert: None<\/p>\n

Genre: Drama<\/p>\n

Starring: Abou Sangar\u00e9 <\/p>\n

Running Time: 1 hr 34 mins<\/p>\n

Souleymane\u2019s Story is an intimate, powerful and moving chronicle of life on the margins. Directed by Boris Lojkine, and written by Lojkine and Delphine Agut, the much-decorated film follows a Guinean immigrant over three frantic days in Paris<\/a> as he works as a food-delivery rider and prepares for a crucial asylum interview.<\/p>\n

Souleymane\u2019s situation is as precarious as John McClane\u2019s in any Die Hard<\/a> movie, but without the glamour and dirty vest. Each night he must rebook a spot in a homeless shelter. Each day he navigates app-driven gig work, unpredictable weather and impossible deadlines. <\/p>\n

His bicycle, like that of the hero of Vittorio De Sica\u2019s<\/a> Bicycle Thieves, is not just transport but the key to his job and stability. Should it break or get stolen, his life and future will fall apart.<\/p>\n

Lojkine\u2019s focus is less on loss and more on the pressure of simply getting by. Sometimes that means illegally sleeping on a stairway. The film studiously avoids melodrama. It doesn\u2019t ask us to pity Souleymane or ponder the complexities of borders. Instead it shows how the apparatus \u2013 immigration, work, housing \u2013 is stacked against people like him. To apply for asylum he must memorise a made-up story about political persecution, because the truth simply won\u2019t be enough.<\/p>\n

Abou Sangar\u00e9, a first-time actor, rightly won Cannes\u2019 Un Certain Regard award for his restrained performance. In real life the actor arrived in France at the age of 16; lacking permanent legal status, he has used his Cannes win to appeal for the right to work as a mechanic.<\/p>\n

He carries the film with buried expressions of fatigue, toil and quiet hope. The camera follows him through the streets, capturing the alienation and lonely rhythms of his routine. Tristan Galand\u2019s over-the-shoulder cinematography and the script\u2019s naturalistic pacing echo the style of the Dardenne brothers and European social-realist classics.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Good Boy: Meet Indy, the adorable canine star of this creepy horror filmOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

There are brief moments of kindness, whether from other migrants, a kebab-shop owner or another shelter resident, but they\u2019re small exceptions in a world that mostly neither cares nor notices. This is a nervy study of how poverty wears people down, eroded by uncertainty and the grinding effort to stay afloat.<\/p>\n

In cinemas from Friday, October 17th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Souleymane\u2019s Story \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 Director: Boris Lojkine Cert: None Genre: Drama Starring: Abou Sangar\u00e9 Running…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82010,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270,53288],"class_list":["post-82009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-pa-feature-showbiz-film-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}