Souleymane's Story

Boris Lojkine's Souleymane's Story (French: L'Histoire de Souleymane) won the Jury Prize and the Best Actor prize at Cannes' Un Certain Regard in 2024. The acting prize went to Abou Sangare, a non-professional Guinean actor whose own immigration status in France was unresolved at the time of the festival. The casting and the prize led directly to a public campaign for his regularisation, and the French interior ministry granted him residency in February 2025.

At the 50th César Awards in early 2025, Sangare won both Best Actor and Most Promising Actor, only the second time in César history that any actor has won both in the same year (the first was the singer Jacques Dutronc in 1989). He also won Best Actor at the Lumière Awards 2025. Lojkine, a former philosophy teacher who had directed Hope (2014) and Camille (2019), has worked with non-professional African actors throughout his career.

The film was shot guerrilla-style in Paris over three weeks in late 2023, following Sangare on a real bicycle through real Uber Eats and Deliveroo deliveries, and many of the supporting performers and customers in shot are non-actors caught on the run. Tristan Galand shot it, and Lojkine co-wrote the script with Delphine Agut. We would put it alongside Andrea Arnold's American Honey and the Dardennes' Rosetta as a reference point for 2020s European naturalism about the working class.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: It spends two days with a delivery rider preparing for an asylum interview, played by a man who was working in a garage when he was cast. Abou Sangaré won at Cannes and then the César, and the film turns the most abstract subject in European politics into a specific person on a bicycle with a deadline. No other film this decade has done that so plainly.