PARIS (AP) — 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 deportation.
Now a lead actor in “Souleymane’s Story,” an award-winning feature film that hit French theaters this week, his face is on every street corner and in subway stations, bus stops and newspapers.
The film and Sangare’s sudden success are casting light on irregular migration in France just 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 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 told The Associated Press 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 set foot in France in May 2017.
His request to be recognized as a minor was turned down, but he was able to study at high school and trained as a car…