Metacritic reviews

Best of all, Lojkine’s film comes with a refreshing generosity of spirit.

Boris Lojkine’s Souleymane’s Story, an affecting film about struggle set over two days in Paris, is the rare character study that does not only build empathy with its hero’s pain but channels its sensation.

While “Souleymane’s Story” throws many roadblocks in this Guinean man’s way, it’s pretty clear where we’re heading. And while that predictability does slightly undermine the weightiness of the journey, the ending, a cathartic revelation, is granted immeasurable pathos due to Sangaré’s overwhelming openness as an actor.

A realistic and very humanistic look at one immigrant’s grueling daily life in Paris, where he struggles to make a living and obtain legal status.

Non-professional Sangare is magnetic throughout, whether on the saddle or an interview hot seat.

If the hero’s dire situation is a ticking clock, Lojkine’s intelligent and empathetic film places us right alongside him, with each cog of circumstance and each gear of good fortune grinding against him at every turn.

The Story of Souleymane is more than its individual parts. Scenes fly by, prompted by the move-move-move! ethos of the hustling immigrant. This is a film told close in close quarters. On several occasions, the camera is so close to our hero that you can smell the desperation coming off his skin, which, as richly and darkly lensed by Tristan Galand, is mutedly lustrous.

Petty humiliations accumulate into a quietly blistering indictment of a culture that’s conditioned immigrants to hustle, wait endlessly, and smile through it all, as if their sanity weren’t constantly under strain.

Sometimes Souleymane feels like he’s sprinting through a race with no finish line, and sometimes he’s running into an unmovable brick wall. The film exists in the space between those opposing outcomes, and its contradictions become its greatest strength as it depicts the endless exhaustion of navigating a system that doesn’t care about you nearly as much as it claims to.