Souleymane’s Story was launched at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024 and has recently been released on some streaming platforms. As the title suggests, it tells the story of Souleymane, a Guinean migrant and food delivery courier in Paris who is ‘sans papiers’. He tries to navigate working as a rider while trying to get prepared for an asylum application interview, two challenges which bring him into an underground world of exploitation and deceit.
Souleymane’s Story is a fictional account, but it’s a remarkably prescient depiction of the reality of working as an undocumented food delivery courier in a major European city. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to understand what ‘sub-letting’ - where you use the app account of another person who deducts a fee for usage - is all about and the stresses and dangers that are inherent to it.
The take-home message about sub-letting is that the rider renting the account never has control. Their livelihood is at the whims of two bosses. First, the account holder, who has full power over the rider’s earnings as they go direct to the account holder’s bank account, and can use that power to make life a living hell for the rider.
In Souleymane’s case, his account holder (Emmanuel) takes a flat rate of €120 per week, which is somewhere around 50% of his earnings. When he delivers pizzas to police officers, he is questioned about how much money his account holder earns from him and his lack of papers, but ultimately they do nothing. The police, like everyone else in Paris, is already well aware that illegal practices are rampant in the food delivery sector.
The second boss is of course the food delivery platform, which has a system of algorithmic management which appears designed to put the rider constantly on edge. After confrontations with a snobby customer and a nasty restaurant owner, Souleymane fears a complaint will lead to being suspended or de-activated from the platform. When he needs to do a facial ID check to stay connected to the platform, Souleymane has to rush to find Emmanuel to take a live picture of himself on the app.
Souleymane’s situation is further complicated by the need to get money together to pay someone for false documentation to aid his asylum application. He's also under pressure to make sure he gets hist story straight for the interview at the ‘ministère de l’Intérieur’. With the stress rising, Souleymane crashes into a car while rushing on his bike to deliver food. At night, he stays in a hostel which looks more like a prison dormitory, and washes his sweaty clothes in the sink. All of this misery to help his unwell mother back in Guinea.
The situation reaches breaking point when he is robo-fired from the app. When calling the platform to try to address the problem, he is simply told that he can write an email and get a response in a few days. App de-activation brings his conflict with the account holder, Emmanuel, to a crescendo.
In a time when dehumanisation of undocumented migrants is rife, Souleymane’s Story is a very human insight into what it really means to live and work in Europe as an undocumented migrant and the pain migrants have to live with when separated from their loved ones back home.
The director, Boris Lojkine, apparently spent a lot of time speaking to food delivery couriers in Paris to learn about their situation, and it tells: Souleymane’s Story is a very accurate portrayal of food delivery work for an undocumented migrant. The story told here is by no means an isolated case either: in big European cities like Paris, Barcelona and London, some believe undocumented migrants make up a majority of riders, while others put the figure at about 25-30%. Black market app-based food delivery is a mass industry in Europe in 2025.
It’s fitting that this film was made in Paris, the city where there has been the most notable resistance among undocumented riders, after Uber Eats de-activated thousands of accounts on mass in the summer of 2022. That turned into a campaign to pressure the French government to make it possible for riders to use invoices as evidence of riders’ work history, so that they can prove that they should be regularised.
Souleymane’s Story should reinforce to all who watch it that denying migrant riders their papers is not in the interests of anyone other than their exploiters: the platforms and the account-holders.
Ben Wray, Gig Economy Project co-ordinator
