Souleymane is a bike courier. From daybreak to the dead of night, he ferries takeout to Parisians for an unnamed food delivery app. It’s tough, thankless work, but there are bigger things on his mind. His immigration case is ready to be heard by the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra), where he must prove that he has faced sufficient persecution to qualify for asylum and be granted the right to stay in France.
Souleymane’s Storyan award-winning 2024 French film that was released in the United States this year, follows its title character over the 48 hours leading up to his interview. He has recently arrived in Paris after a harrowing multiyear trek from Guinea in search of economic opportunity, desperate to make money to send home to his ailing mother. In Paris, a full day of work could net him a couple hundred euros, but a bike crash, disgruntled customer, or run-in with the authorities could bring his precarious existence crashing down.
Souleymane is a bike courier. From daybreak to the dead of night, he ferries takeout to Parisians for an unnamed food delivery app. It’s tough, thankless work, but there are bigger things on his mind. His immigration case is ready to be heard by the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra), where he must prove that he has faced sufficient persecution to qualify for asylum and be granted the right to stay in France.
Souleymane’s Storyan award-winning 2024 French film that was released in the United States this year, follows its title character over the 48 hours leading up to his interview. He has recently arrived in Paris after a harrowing multiyear trek from Guinea in search of economic opportunity, desperate to make money to send home to his ailing mother. In Paris, a full day of work could net him a couple hundred euros, but a bike crash, disgruntled customer, or run-in with the authorities could bring his precarious existence crashing down.
Yet this is not the story he is practicing for his Ofpra agent. Instead, he hands over each day’s earnings to an “asylum coach” to feed him fake papers and a fabricated tale of persecution. As Souleymane pedals, he practices his lines, struggling to memorize the details of a young activist jailed for his beliefs. “I don’t know politics!” he says in frustration. But it’s what the authorities want to hear, and he needs to get this right.
French director Boris Lojkine uses these twin stories of Souleymane—the reality of being a gig-economy-employed immigrant and the fictional tale he clings to—to tell an incisive, heartbreaking, and visually stunning tale of the unseen labor done by immigrants in a country that doesn’t want them there, even as it relies on them for its insatiable appetite.
A person working for Uber Eats in Paris on April 24, 2020.Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images
Like many countries in EuropeFrance has experienced a surge in support for the far right in recent years, along with a sharp rise in racism and xenophobia. In 2023, the country’s National Consultative Commission on Human Rights recorded a spike of hate crimes, citing a “significant deterioration in the perception of immigration.” The far-right National Rally (RN) party has made “[stopping] the flood of immigrants” a key part of its platform, which entails measures including enacting more barriers to French citizenship and cutting health care for undocumented migrants. The RN won an unprecedented 31 percent of the vote in last year’s European election, with RN voters saying that immigration was the number one issue driving them to the polls.
Still, many people in France are trying to push back. After the first round of the country’s legislative elections on June 30, 2024, when the RN topped election results and looked poised to enter government, French voters turned out in force to protest the far right. They backed this up in the second-round votewhen centrist and leftist voters came together to push the RN to third place. However, France has remained deeply fragmented and mired in political chaos, with three collapsed governments since the elections. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen has said her party’s victory was merely delayedand the RN continues to lead in the polls ahead of the 2027 presidential election.
While France’s political future is uncertain, the RN’s ability to normalize its anti-immigration rhetoric does not bode well for the country’s estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants. Across the West, even politicians who might be more supportive of immigration have increasingly used incendiary languagesuch as calling immigrants “illegal.” The Vera Institute of Justice has warned of the dangers of describing migrants as a “surge” or “flood”—which then-French Prime Minister François Bayrou faced backlash for earlier this year.
When this dehumanizing rhetoric is repeated in media coverage of immigration, it influences public opinion. Over the past decade, tabloids have whipped the Western public into a frenzy over fears of a “great replacement.” And this goes beyond the news to include fictional portrayals. In film and television, immigrant characters are often associated with crime or otherwise reduced to flat, one-dimensional stereotypes.
By choosing to tell Souleymane’s story, Lojkine challenges these stereotypes. Lojkine does not add artificial sympathy to his film, which could easily come off as cloying or cliched. Nor does he amplify the overt racism faced by migrants in France. Instead, his film simply centers the everyday life of one of the thousands of delivery couriers whose labor propels the gig economy.
The film moves at a quick, frantic pace, and the drama is provided by the constant points of friction that Souleymane faces along his route. These tiny inconveniences become a matter of survival. He takes a wrong turn and crashes his bike, jeopardizing his only mode of transportation and tool for making money. The customer then refuses the crumbled bag of food, disputing the order and temporarily suspending Souleymane’s account. A delay in picking up an order leads to a shouting match with a restaurant owner.
Souleymane’s e-bike is one of the few items he has to his name. Without the right to work, he doesn’t even have his own delivery account. Instead, he uses the hand-me-down profile of a fellow Guinean immigrant named Emmanuel. He acts like Souleymane’s pimp, taking a hefty cut of his profits and regulating his access to the account. At random points in the day, the app demands a selfie for verification, forcing Souleymane to track down the elusive Emmanual before going onto the next delivery.
Souleymane doesn’t have his own place to sleep, either. He finishes each day by catching the 10 p.m. bus back to a shelter at the outskirts of town, where he sleeps in cramped barracks, before waking up at 6 a.m. to call a hotline to reserve that night’s bed.
In some ways, Souleymane is “good” at being an immigrant. He knows how to jump through the right hoops, keep his head down, and work hard. But in no way is it a genuine livelihood. Between paying Emmanuel and his asylum coach, he has less and less money to send home, as we are reminded of during bittersweet calls with his mother, the only moments of quiet calm during the film.
All the while, Souleymane focuses his energy on memorizing the story that he believes is his ticket to asylum, if he can just remember the names of various local political leaders and the layout of the Guinean prison he was supposedly held in. His coach has a whole roster of personas for migrants to choose from; one fellow classmate, for instance, is learning the woman-fleeing-domestic-violence role. But as he tries to weave a new tale of adversity to prove that he has earned a right to be in France, audiences see how hard his life is, even without the lie.
Sangaré as Souleymane in Souleymane’s Story.Boris Lojkine via Conic
French audiences were ready to embrace Souleymane’s Story. The film debuted at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard category—the festival’s selection of films that champion non-traditional perspectives. It was nominated for eight Cesar Awards and won four, including Best Original Screenplay. Establishment media and everyday reviewers praised the film upon its release for both its filmmaking achievement and fullhearted pro-immigrant stance. A top review on Letterboxd reads: “we fuck uber eats and we open the borders” (“we’ll screw Uber Eats and open the borders”).
The key to Souleymane’s Story’s authenticity is its star. Abou Sangaré is also an immigrant from Guinea, who made the trek to Paris when he was a teenager. For years, he struggled to attain permanent residency. In France, he attended school and worked as a mechanic, before he was discovered during the casting process for this film. His performance, which drew on his own experiences, won him one of Cannes’s top acting awards, but it was only after the film’s release that he was granted a residency permit: Now, he works as a mechanic, a career deemed in-demand in the country.
As the film’s success brings attention to the realities of delivering food on two wheels, a better future for Paris’s bike couriers could be within sight. A recent report from the French agency for food, environment, and work safety detailed the risks faced by bike couriers—including exhaustion and the risk of accidents—and called for stronger government oversight. Meanwhile, the country’s labor and transport ministries met with representatives of gig work platforms in June to discuss their responsibility to their contractors; France is also considering proposing legislation that would ensure better labor protections and fair wages for couriers.
For now, though, delivery workers continue to toil away with modest support. Tucked away on a side street near the center of Paris is the House of Couriersor Couriers’ House. The building is a refuge for the city’s delivery workers, offering a place off the street to rest and recharge. In addition to hot drinks and phone chargers, the center offers various forms of legal and social assistance. Today, a large movie poster for Souleymane’s Story hangs in the common room, showing Sangaré as he cycles down the street, his face weary but determined.
