France: Revealed in the cinema, Abou Sangare still threatened with expulsion

A few months ago, Abou Sangare was an anonymous 23-year-old Guinean immigrant, without permanent legal status in northern France and, like thousands of others, fighting deportation.

Now the lead actor in "The Story of Souleymane ," an award-winning feature film that was released in French theaters this week, his face appears on every street corner, in metro stations, at bus stops and in newspapers.

The film and the sudden success of Abou Sangare shed light on illegal immigration in France , at a time when the new government is adopting a tougher stance on the issue. It has pledged to make it harder for immigrants without permanent legal status to stay and easier for them to be expelled from France.

Abou Sangare plays a young asylum seeker who works as a delivery boy in Paris , weaving through the traffic of the City of Lights on his bike. In a case where life imitates art, Sangare’s future is also at stake. Like the character he plays, Abou Sangare hopes to persuade the French authorities to grant him residency and abandon their efforts to force him to leave.

"When I see Souleymane sitting at the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, I put myself in his shoes, because I know what it's like to wait for your identity papers here in France, to be in this situation - the stress, the anxiety ," Abou Sangare said in an interview with The Associated Press. "Like me, Souleymane finds himself in an environment he doesn't know."

He says he left Guinea at the age of 15 in 2016 to help his sick mother. He first went to Algeria , then to Libya , where he was imprisoned and treated “like a slave” after a failed crossing attempt. Italy followed, and he finally set foot in France in May 2017.

His request to be recognized as a minor was rejected, but he was able to attend high school and trained as a car mechanic – a sought-after skill in France. He was recently offered a full-time job at a workshop in Amiens, a city in northern France where he has lived for seven years, which is also the hometown of French President Emmanuel Macron .

But Abou Sangare cannot take the job because of his illegal status. He has applied for papers three times, unsuccessfully, and lives with a deportation order hanging over his head. Critics say successive governments have increasingly resorted to deportation measures.

"We are the country in Europe that produces the most expulsion procedures, far ahead of other countries ," says Serge Slama, professor of public law at the University of Grenoble.

But their use - more than 130,000 evictions were ordered in 2023 - is "very ineffective ," he added, because many orders are not enforced or cannot be enforced for legal reasons.

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau says about 10 percent of those targeted for deportation end up leaving. Mr. Retailleau, appointed last month to France’s new government of conservatives and centrists, has made immigration control a priority. He wants more immigrants without permanent legal status to be placed in detention centers and for longer periods.

Mathilde Buffière, who works with immigrants in administrative detention centers within the Groupe SOS Solidarités , says that officials spend "less and less time" examining immigrants' residency applications before placing them in detention centers.

In the case of Abou Sangare, his life took a turn last year when he met filmmaker Boris Lojkine . Several auditions led to him getting the lead role in the film. Sangare won the best actor award at the "Un Certain Regard" competition at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

But a bigger prize may be on the horizon: After Cannes, government officials emailed Sangare, urging him to renew his residency application.

Responding to questions from the AP, French authorities said the deportation order against Sangare "remains legally in force ," but added that authorities were reviewing his case because of the steps he has taken to integrate.

"I think it was the movie that did it ," Sangare told AP. "You need a residence permit to change your life here. My life will change the day I get my papers ," he added.