When he looked up from the cup of tea he was holding, Abou Sangare's gaze settled gently. No, he hasn't yet seen L'Histoire de Souleymane ("Souleymane's story"), Boris Lojkine's feature film in which he himself plays the main character. He's not sure he wants to. "Maybe in Cannes." The film will be presented there on Sunday, May 19, in the Un Certain Regard selection.

It's the story of Souleymane, a young Guinean in Paris who, while waiting for his asylum application, juggles the life of an illegal immigrant, cheap labor for bike delivery apps, tossed from dormitory to soup kitchen, scammed whenever possible, living sleepless nights that the rest of the world ignores as long as they don't disturb theirs.

Sangare, on the other hand, is a mechanic who has been living in Amiens for six years. The similarities end there. In real life, the actor has the same calm demeanor as his cinematic alter ego, the same resistance to misery drawing strength from a seemingly unalterable peaceful resilience. In the middle of filming, on the corner of Rue Châteaudun and Rue Maubeuge in Paris, a lady's car broke down. The director saw Sangare park his bike, open the hood of the car, dive into the engine, and explain to the lady how to get home with details that Lojkine said he understood nothing about. Like his character, Souleymane, the young actor who is also waiting to be legalized, has the generosity of the disadvantaged.

Sangare was born on May 7, 2001 in Sinko, in southeastern Guinea. His birthplace was sparsely populated, tropical climate, all dirt roads. Since independence, the country has seen its share of coups d'état and political upheavals that, like Souleymane, Sangare knows nothing about. All this is far removed from his life. His family lives on mixed farming: rice, manioc and a few cattle. Well, his family, it is just his mother. He never knew his father, whose second wife his mother is. He has an older brother "who comes and goes," and a sister who has found a husband in Conakry. They've lost touch.

At the age of 7, Sangare was no longer at school but working in a garage. That's because his mother was ill. "The devil's disease." That's what they call it over there. Epileptic seizures, the origin of which he would never know: genetic, viral, tumor? Because they couldn't afford to hospitalize her, he decided, at the age of 15, to "go on an adventure," to leave the country to, like millions before him since the beginning of time, seek his fortune.

His mother died shortly after his arrival in France. The trauma he recounted, with restrained sadness, was still so strong that Lojkine decided to include it in his film. For this highly scripted screenplay – 180 pages of text that the young mechanic had to learn – the director, who already made a name for himself with Hope (2015) and Camille (2019), had to "do a lot of rehearsals with all the actors to get the words into their mouths."

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