SIFF 2025: Souleymane's Story // Bitter Gold

Souleymane's Story
dir. Boris Lojkine

The humming neon betrays a sense of extant hopelessness, the rain slicked Parisian streets bustling with life but only on the surface – the city of romance and dreams built on the back of migrant hustle, people desperately working and clinging onto distant possibility. Boris Lojkine's tightly structured drama comes closest to the vérité realism of Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou's Take Out, similarly following a destitute immigrant who must desperately work the thankless gig economy of food delivery in order to make the money necessary to survive in a world of power structures all aimed against immigrant success. But while Take Out focused on the repayment of one specific debt, Souleymane's Story weaves through the multitude of ways that the odds are stacked against its protagonist, as the Guinean asylum-seeker works tirelessly to make it through to his interview with the necessary resources required for his application to be accepted. Its framing positions race as the crux of division throughout, still suffering beneath the weight of French colonialism. Every white person Souleymane encounters holds a key position of leverage over him – from immigration officers to police, all the way down to restaurant owners and even the customers relying on him for delivery, they all toy with the fragile tension of his fate, knowingly or unknowingly, playing into the teetering stack of structures he must feed into in order to survive. It is his story, but what's important are not the words, even when the film ultimately breaks from its carefully constructed climax and falls to teary, heartfelt honesty. There still remains a thick layer of colonial manipulation, a tension that relies as much on human empathy as it relies on racially charged sympathetic guilt. It's all left hanging in the foggy Parisian air, a whisper that questions a deeply flawed system that leaves people trapped in an infinite, nightmarish purgatory. A story all too common.

Bitter Gold
dir. Juan Francisco Olea

The visual language of the western translates well to the dusty, arid badlands of North Chile, commanding a sense of both fierce independence and a brutal resistance to authority, a world led by the meager profits squeezed out of every stone. It is also a world of heightened patriarchy, a sun-drenched landscape ruled by men who serve corroded old-world labor structures in a space with little else to offer. Everything in the dusty hills leads to the mines, expectations and knowledge clashing and crumbing against the next paycheck. Wealth tastes bitter, the promise of security and a future locked behind the cold stone, searching for a vein that will only bring violence and masculine rage. It is in this landscape that Carola (Katalina Sanchez) must survive, tied only tenuously to her father who runs a small mining operation in the isolated wilderness. There is little money to be made and even less respect to be found for a young woman fighting against these aging structures, but the faint whiff of the potential payday that might be hidden somewhere deep in the mines brings lead and anger, as well as clean-cut modernist corporatism that leverages legality against the misery of these impoverished miners. Blood, sand, the rumble of explosives, and a commanding lead performance make for a thrilling neo-Western capable of updating the tenets of the genre for a modern space.

SIFF 2025 takes place from May 15-June 1, 2025. Find out more information about the fest here, and find continued coverage here on Step Printed.