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Associated Press

A few months ago, Abou Sangare was an anonymous, 23-year-old Guinean immigrant lacking permanent legal status in northern France and, like thousands of others, fighting.
Now a lead actor in Souleymane’s Story, an award-winning feature film that hit French cinemas this week, his face is on every street corner and in metro stations, bus stops and newspapers.
The film and Sangare’s sudden success are casting light on irregular migration in France as its new government is taking a harder line on the issue.
It is vowing to make it harder for immigrants lacking permanent legal status to stay and easier for France to expel them.
Sangare plays a young asylum seeker who works as a Paris delivery man, weaving his bicycle through the traffic in the City of Light. In a case of life imitating art, Sangare’s future also hangs in the balance.
Like the character he portrays, Sangare is hoping to persuade French officials to grant him residency and abandon their efforts to force him to leave.


“When I see Souleymane sitting in the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, I put myself in his place, because I know what it’s like to wait for your (identification) papers here in France, to be in this situation – the stress, the anxiety,” Sangare said in an interview.
“Like me, Souleymane finds himself in an environment that he doesn’t know.”
Sangare says he left Guinea at age 15 in 2016 to help his sick mother. He first went to Algeria, then Libya, where he was jailed and treated “as a slave” after a failed crossing attempt. Italy was next, and he eventually made it to France in May 2017.
His request to be recognised as a minor was turned down, but he was able to study at high school and trained as a car mechanic – a skill in demand in France.
Recently, he was offered full-time employment at a workshop in Amiens, a northern French town that has been his home for seven years and which, incidentally, was French President Emmanuel Macron’s hometown, too.

But Sangare cannot accept the job because of his illegal status. He has unsuccessfully applied three times for papers and lives with a deportation order over his head.
Critics say orders have been increasingly used by successive governments.
“We are the country in Europe that produces most expulsion procedures, far ahead of other countries,” said Serge Slama, a professor in public law at the University of Grenoble.
But their use – more than 130,000 deportations were ordered in 2023 – is “highly inefficient”, he added, because many of the orders are not or cannot for legal reasons be carried out.
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau says about 10 per cent of people targeted end up leaving.
You need a residency permit to be able to turn your life around here. My life will change the day I have my papers
Abou Sangare, star of Souleymane’s Story
Retailleau, appointed in France’s new government of conservatives and centrists last month, is making immigration control a priority.
He wants more immigrants lacking permanent legal status to be held in detention centres and for longer periods, and is leaning on regional administrators to get tough.
He also says he wants to reduce the number of foreigners entering France by making it “less attractive”, including squeezing social benefits for them.
Mathilde Buffière, who works with immigrants in administrative detention centres with the non-profit Groupe SOS Solidarités, says officials are spending “less and less time” reviewing immigrants’ residency applications before holding them in detention centres.
In Sangare’s case, his life took a turn last year when he met filmmaker Boris Lojkine. Several auditions led to him getting the film’s lead role.

Sangare won best actor in the Cannes Film Festival’s “Un Certain Regard” competition this year.
But a more meaningful prize might be on the horizon: after Cannes, government officials emailed Sangare, inviting him to renew his residency application.
Responding to questions, French authorities said the order against Sangare “remains legally in force” but added that officials re-examined his case because of steps he has taken to integrate.
“I think the film did that,” Sangare said.
“You need a residency permit to be able to turn your life around here. My life will change the day I have my papers,” he said.


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Abou Sangare, lead actor in Souleymane’s Story, after a premiere at the Louxor cinema in Paris. Photo: AP 

Abou Sangare as asylum seeker Souleymane in a still from Souleymane’s Story, a role which earned him a best actor prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. The actor is an immigrant himself, and faces deportation from France. Photo: Instagram/@escurialpanorama

The star of Souleymane’s Story, Abou Sangare, at the Cannes Film Festival. Photo: Instagram/@cineuropa.official

Abou Sangare, lead actor in Souleymane’s Story, poses for photographs after a premiere at the Louxor cinema in Paris. Photo: AP

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Abou Sangare, who stars in Souleymane’s Story as an asylum seeker and delivery driver in Paris, has a deportation order hanging over him


Abou Sangare, who stars in Souleymane’s Story as an asylum seeker and delivery driver in Paris, has a deportation order hanging over him.


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