Souleymane’s Story (2024) directed by Boris Lojkine and starring Abou Sangare. Triple award winner at the 2024 Cannes Film festival, in cinemas now.

Souleymane is a migrant from the Republic of Guinea in West Africa. He has travelled across the desert to Libya then through Italy to France. He works ‘illegally’ as a food delivery rider in Paris. The film takes place over three days leading up to the crucial interview which help decide his residential status in France.

His story represents the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of workers from the global majority who are trying to make a life for themselves in Europe today. He could be the Deliveroo rider who delivers your takeaway meal this evening.

The camera takes you alongside Souleymane throughout the day and the night. You ride with him as he goes back and forth through the traffic of central Paris. The whole cinema where I watched it jolted forward when he crashes into a car. The camera operators were literally riding on other bikes close to Souleymane.  

In another scene we are part of half a dozen riders who are being forced to wait too long for their food packages at a bistro whose chef is way behind on making the orders. The riders get more and more riled, Souleyman pushes forward to confront the chef who just chucks him out.

Time as exploitation

For these workers who are artificially defined as legally self employed contractors, time works quite differently to a normal capitalist workplace. If you are in a factory the boss exploits you by taking surplus value from your unpaid labour time. So if the line or computers go down you are rather happy and unconcerned. If you are self employed losing time means you are losing money since you are your own boss even if you are being ripped off by a feudal style contract.  

The big corporate company profits from a platform app  and pays you a poverty rate fee that can be adjusted at their whim.  At any moment some faceless online operative can end your livelihood by closing your account if customers have given negative feedback

All the way through Souleymane is fighting this time constraint – he is always rushing to deliver his orders, to try and get the person he subcontracts the bike from to pay him, to get the guy who has the documents he needs, to make it on time to the interview or to find a few moments to talk to his fiancé or mother in Guinea. It is relentless and gut wrenching.

Migrants not romanticised

The film does not flinch from what happens to migrants. Yes, there are expressions of friendship, banter and solidarity.  But in a dog eat dog capitalist system some migrants who have got themselves established do take advantage of the last wave that arrives. So Souleymane rents his bike from someone who has residential status. You need a bank account and an official identity to be a delivery driver.

This character takes about a third of Souleymane’s weekly income. Just like in Britain you are not allowed to work if you are an asylum seeker.  Shamefully the current Labour government continues this policy and even proclaims how fiercely they are pursuing food delivery riders and other workers who are working ‘illegally’.

Mainstream media produces a ‘migrant narrative’

Today on the BBC news programmes headlined a year-long investigation its journalists have been carrying out into high street minimarts selling contraband cigarettes, staffed by asylum seekers and run by a Kurdish organized crime network. Nobody is in favour of tax evasion and the way  asylum seekers are exploited in this operation, but if you looked more closely it was all fairly small scale stuff to be given such huge attention.

One shop has a selling price of £18,000.  This is peanuts compared to the sums associated with corporate fraud and tax evasion – look at the Covid fast stream scams or even the Car finance rip off.  Labour resolved the latter with a deal that reduced the compensation banks had to pay.

Will Michelle Mone, who made millions out of unsafe PPE equipment, ever see the inside of a jail?  BBC journalists seem happier spending huge amounts denouncing migrants and targeting the non-white criminals at the bottom end.

Visconti revisited

When Souleymane crashes he is less interested in his personal injuries than the implications of not having a serviceable bike. It is damaged but not a write off so we are there on the saddle with him hearing the jolting and jarring of the bike, hoping it will not break down. His bike means he can work and eke out some living, without it he would have to survive on charity.

The bike almost becomes another key character in the film. It reminded me of the Neo-Realist classic from over 75 years ago, Bicycle Thieves directed by Luciano Visconti. That film revolves around the worker having his bike stolen. The action in the Italian film is in real time, this film has the same feel even if it stretches over a couple of days and a night.  A real time framework can intensify the emotion in a film.

Like Visconti, Lojkine does not use a musical soundtrack.  He uses the ambient sounds of a Paris that tourists never see.  Scarcely a recognized monument is shown. Instead we are invited to the outer suburbs where the working class – many of whom are ethnic minorities – are stacked in a concrete jungle of high rises. 

We are shown the fragile apparatus of support for migrants, the hanger like dormitories, the queues for the shower, the basic refectory, the soup kitchens at night – mostly run by charities, the church and committed volunteers.

This film chooses to focus on the real life overlap between what has been crudely labeled ‘economic’ migrants and asylum seekers.  Souleymane is shown learning a script pretending he was a political dissident who had been detained and abused by the Guinean authorities.  It is naïve to think this never happens even if it is a minority of cases. 

As the climax shows there are other legitimate reasons why he fled his home. Who are we to judge living in a different social and economic context who should be allowed to work where?

Why there are no ‘illegals’

The same capitalist class who exploit us here have migrated their capital throughout Africa, extracted its wealth and employed its workers and peasants wherever it liked.  Capital has no borders. More workers from Africa alongside us here are a source of productive wealth for all unless you accept the capitalist and government myth about migrants competing with ‘native’ workers for limited resources. Remember it is that class who currently decides what is produced and the share out any resources.  

The bosses want us to believe that all wealth and production depends on their entrepreneurial genius and investment – they have it upside down, all wealth is produced by workers.  It suits the bosses to divide workers into migrants and British, to foment racism and prevent their unity. Farage and Reform are the vanguard in leading this but the Tories and Labour adopt the same narrative.

This film is an antidote to the dehumanization of the migrant and asylum seeker.  It is no accident that the director chose to call the film by the migrant’s name.  Most of the time politicians and journalists use generic terms like migrants, ‘illegal migrants’ or often just ‘illegals’. This film illustrates and affirms the identity of one worker seeking a better life.  

Eli Shafak, the Turkish/British novelist, has written some beautiful words that express all this:

A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our live and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference.

Cartography is another name for stories told by wnners.

For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one

p 1 The Island of Missing Trees

Art Book Review Books Capitalism China Climate Emergency Conservative Government Conservative Party COVID-19 EcoSocialism Elections Europe Fascism Film Film Review France Gaza Imperialism Israel Italy Keir Starmer Labour Party Long Read Marxism Marxist Theory Palestine pandemic Protest Russia Solidarity Statement Trade Unionism Ukraine United States of America War