“We’re not in Europe to play games!” Souleymane has fled Guinea and wants to build a new life in France. Without a passport or official papers, he struggles to get by in Paris as a bicycle courier. To earn money, he works under precarious conditions for a delivery service. As he races tirelessly through the chaotic city day and night, sleeping in emergency shelters and borrowing identities just to be able to work, time is running out for him. In just 48 hours, he has his crucial interview at the immigration office: an appointment that will ultimately decide based on his migration story, whether he gets asylum or is deported, and thus his future in Europe. If he is granted protection, he will be allowed to live and work here…
A feature film that authentically depicts the realities of migrant communities in European cities: the harshness of arrival, the exploitation of many in the gig economy, the struggle to stay. Non-professional actor Abou Sangare, himself an undocumented migrant, gives an impressive performance as Souleymane – a performance that earned him the award for Best Actor at Cannes Film Festival and the European Film Awards.
The evening combines the film screening, discussion topics from migration experts, and an exchange of knowledge and experiences among the audience.
Thursday, December 4 6:00 – 8:00 pm at Rollberg Kino
Manuela Bojadžijev, Berliner Institut für Migrationsforschung
Manuela Bojadžijev is a professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin and heads the department “Migration in a Global Perspective” at the Berlin Institute for Migration Research (BIM). She researches ‘contestations over migration’ within migration societies and how social change is narrated and experienced through representations of migration and displacement.
From 2017 to 2021, she was co-curator of a broad-based oral history project, the digital Archive of Refuge. With Manuela Bojadžijev, we discuss questions such as: What role does telling “the right story” actually play in asylum procedures?
What is the relationship between fiction and documentation in the film? – and what effect does this have on our understanding of “immigration society”?
Aju John
Aju John, Activist / Researcher
Aju John is a lawyer, activist and ethnographer. He founded Migrant*innen für Menschenwürdige Arbeit, an organisation that advocates for migrants in low-wage jobs in Germany. His activism is informed by his research into the experiences of South Asian men working in food delivery.
The podcast Delivery Charge, which he publishes, documents various forms of organised resistance in platform work. Through his work, he campaigns for workers’ rights and for a better understanding of the experiences of migrants and their everyday lives in major European cities—between digital platform jobs, informal employment, and precarious residence conditions.
WATCHLIST / FURTHER READING
After the movie / Learn more:
If you want to know more about the topics discussed during the evening, find here a selection of Migration Matters videos that may be of interest to you:
Expert Video (4:25min)
Hein de Haas: Who are we allowing in? Who are we trying to keep out?
Films with powerful migration stories that we recommend—you can find them on streaming platforms online:
Anywhere Anytime
2024, Milad Tangshir, Italy
Feature Film, 82min
The film follows Issa, a young undocumented Senegalese migrant arrived in Turin, who depends on a bicycle for his food delivery job. When the bike is stolen, he embarks on a desperate journey across the city to retrieve it – a quest that echoes the film Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)and at the same timeexposing the (in)visible struggles of contemporary migrants’ life.
Critical Notes: Departing from dominant media narratives about newcomers, director Tangshir centers a Senegalese migrant’s perspective through close-ups and point-of-view shots that immerse the viewer in Issa’s emotional world. By following a real delivery rider for a year and casting a non-professional actor, the director builds an authentic sense of empathy and subjectivity. The film’s pivotal dilemma – whether Issa should steal a bike to survive – invites the audience to share his ethical crossroads and develop a deeper understanding of migration beyond stereotypes. Minimalist in form yet charged with tension, Anywhere Anytime portrays the precarity of life on the margins while revealing fleeting human connections that counteract invisibility and alienation.
The Hearing (Die Anhörung)
2023, Lisa Gerig, Switzerland
Docu-Fiction, 81min
In this film four asylum seekers re-enact the official hearing that determine their right to stay in Europe. Between memory and staged performance, their testimonies reveal how bureaucratic language shapes the fate of human lives.
Critical Notes: Director Lisa Gerig transforms asylum interviews into a cinematic act of resistance, where reclaiming one’s story becomes a form of political agency. An interesting narrative device: at some point, the roles in the hearing situation are inverted: the migrants question decision-makers, and thus symbolically getting the power to judge their own reality. The film shows the blurred boundary between truth and credibility, asking who makes a human’s life story legitimate.
The Other Side of Hope (Toivon tuolla puolen)
2017, Aki Kaurismäki, Finland/Germany
Feature Film, 100min
Khaled, a Syrian refugee who requests asylum in Finland and seeks his sister, cross his path with Waldemar, a Finnish salesman who wins a fortune and buys a restaurant. They gradually get to know each other, creating something new together amid bureaucracy and indifference.
Critical Notes: With deadpan humor, this film represents the contradictions of starting a new life as a migrant, seeking a space of quiet solidarity at the margins of Europe. Minimalism and stylised cool color palettes go with the absurd coexistence in life of cruelty and compassion. The film envisions “staying” not as assimilation, but as the fragile daily transformation between forms of solitude of two outsiders that slowly learn to help each other.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
2020, Burhan Qurbani, Germany/Netherlands
Feature Film, 140min
A modern adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel, the film relocates the story to contemporary Germany and follows Francis, a refugee from Guinea-Bissau who survives a shipwreck while crossing the Mediterranean. Determined to live honestly in Berlin, he faces the contradictions of the asylum system and the exploitative underworld of Berlin, where his name and identity are gradually reshaped by the pressures of survival.
Critical Notes: The migrant figure oscillates between hero and anti-hero, embodying a critique of structural racism and the nation’s ambivalent stance toward the cultural “Southern Other.” Through Francis’s descent into the criminal underworld, Qurbani links Germany’s pragmatic migration policies (rooted in economic utility and selective inclusion) to colonial and neocolonial practices. The villain becomes a metaphor for the duplicity of a system that both welcomes and oppresses. The protagonist’s symbolic baptism, marked by the “germanisation” of his name, underscores the violence of assimilation and the asymmetry of power between Europeans and non-Europeans. A complex reflection on how the promises of social inclusion are entangled with systemic exclusion and moral compromise.
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Film recommendations compiled by Migration Matters collaborator Raissa Baroni, doctoral candidate at the University of Turin, where she is conducting research on “Migrant Mediascapes: The Cinema of Migrations as a Medium for Intercultural Understanding in Italian and German Film heritage (2011–2026)”.
