Born of necessity but in the most modest circumstances, with a borrowed camera and volunteer crew, the film that premiered five years later at the Cannes Film Festival had developed into a politically astute, formally dazzling hybrid of documentary and fiction. Sokhona played the role of a young man clandestinely arriving in Paris in the trunk of a car to be confronted with the dead ends of a crippling bureaucracy, inadequate housing conditions and employment opportunities, overt racism, and the well-meaning but domineering efforts of the progressive Left.

With Western capitalism, anti-blackness, and migration at its fore, the film’s politics is more than ever relevant to current public debates on inequalities.