PORTALS CINEMA FORUM: L’histoire de Souleyman

Portals is an experiment in curating, distributing and, above all, exhibiting international arthouse, non-english language, and independent world cinema for African audiences. Following a lineage of cinema as witness and imagination through resistance, we welcome you to our first edition in Joburg, a port without a sea. People arrive here carrying everything they have. We invite you to gather with us, as a way of crossing borders, encountering other lives, and thinking about power across past, present, and future through film.

Booking: Purchase a "R20 Cafe Voucher" to reserve your seat for this screening. This will get you R20 off your Bioscope Cafe bill on this day.

L’histoire de Souleyman

Our closing film follows one man’s race against time through a city that depends on his labour while withholding belonging from him.

As he pedals through the streets of Paris to deliver meals, Souleymane recounts his story. In two days, he has to go through his asylum application interview, the key to obtaining papers. But Souleymane is not ready.

It speaks to the questions at the heart of Portals: who gets to cross borders and whose stories are believed, but it also urges us to think about the cost of convenience in our economy.

Digital platforms turn precarity into a business model. In Johannesburg, a city shaped by migration and the informal economies migrants build, the film’s questions about work, documentation and dignity feel close to home.