“The stories that immigrants tell do not come from their imagination” – Libération

At the heart of the film “The Story of Souleymane”, released in cinemas on Wednesday, the question of the truth in the stories of people wishing to obtain papers is omnipresent, flirting on an intimate ridge. From Oran to Paris, testimonies.

Hafid lives at the top of town. By car, you have to climb a long screw-shaped hill to access Les Planteurs, a working-class district of the largest city in western Algeria, Oran. Local elders tell a story: at the time of colonization, the French organized car races every Saturday. They were climbing the hill at full speed. Hafid, 19, looks elsewhere. He prefers the future to the past. In the heart of August, in a small house – “where it is too hot in the summers and too cold in the winters” – the slender man takes a staircase. He opens a scrap iron door which gives access to the roof of the house. The landscape is insane. Oran in a big way. The port, the waterfront, the city center and the rest. Hafid spends many nights on the roof. “I go up with my cigarettes, a little coffee, when everyone is asleep at home, and I look, he said, standing facing the sea, chewing a plastic pen cap. Looking at the lights on the boats entering or parking before returning to port, I think of my departure. I have to leave. I have no future here, without work and without money.”

A little later today. Hafid is still chewing his hood, but the landscape e