This 2024 French award-winning movie opened briefly in NYC this summer, and I was lucky enough to catch it. It is a breathtaking chronicle of three days in the life of an undocumented migrant in Paris from Guinea, West Africa—Souleymane. By day he bikes through the streets of Paris hustling food deliveries and at night sleeps in homeless shelters for immigrants, preparing constantly and stubbornly for his asylum status hearing which is in two days. Abou Sangare—a first-time actor—brings alive the heartache and desperation, as well as the camaraderie, of these migrants, as it mirrors his own life experience. The heartbreaking reality of what daily life brings to these men, the casual indignities they have to suffer—mostly in silence—the constant pressure to scrape together even a few euros to send to those back home depending on them… all this unfolds unendingly. The men alternately turn their backs on each other because they are in a fight for survival, and then engage in unexpected acts of kindness and generosity. Beyond the mean streets of Paris, the film shows the conditions Souleymane faced in Guinea which led him to flee, enduring wrenching horrors traveling to France where the only place for him is at the very bottom of a parasitic society. 

Multiply Souleymane by tens, hundreds of thousands, millions around the planet—you see a world where imperialism has ravaged these countries—their economies, their social networks, their political systems—to create whole swathes of people roaming the planet for a place to exist. Some of the particularities of the Souleymanes of West Africa and Europe are different than those of the people driven to the U.S. from Mexico and what they are now facing with the inhuman ICE raids—but all of it cries out for a world where all people would be treasured and their potential would be unleashed, not crushed and twisted, the kind of society Bob Avakian outlines in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic of North America.

People in the audience were stunned by the power of the pictures of these lives—shedding quiet tears, unable to move. See this movie. Think about taking the reality of the world we could have to the audience who has just been forced to confront what this whole capitalist-imperialist system does to human beings in this world.  

This movie underscores and brings to life this quote in We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System: “We can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. And it is a scientific fact that humanity does not have to live this way.”