FLEE, a brave new stylistic animated documentary

Review by Robin Menken

Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s award-winning animated doc FLEE opens in U.S. theaters on December 3.  NEON acquired FLEE at Sundance, and the film is also an official selection at Cannes that recently won the Annecy Festival (France) Cristal award and the Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary.

It’s the story of a young, gay Afghan who manages to flee Afghanistan during the war. After years of attempts, his family manages to reach Europe, separated among several countries.

Based on interviews Rasmussen conducted with his childhood friend Amin Nawabi (a pseudonym), the film is the most nuanced film about refugees I’ve seen since Michael Winterbottom’s remarkable In This World (2003).

Rasmussen has created a delicate portrait of his friend that illumines the tragic worldwide drama of refugees.

Like Amin, Rasmussen’s Jewish grandmother was on the run for years. She and her family fled Russian pogroms, and also crossed the Baltic Sea to Denmark. Denied asylum, they were forced to move to Germany. Under the Nazi regime, his school age grandmother wore the yellow star. Eventually she fled to England.

Rasmussen’s interviews with Amin reassemble a Freudian session. Amin lies on a couch, closing his eyes to slip into a memory state.  

Micro expressions, little sideways glances, and a sound mix that capture Amin’s every nervous intake of breath, intensify our dramatic intimacy with him.

Lyrical flat animation and rotoscoping mixed with live action archival footage tell the story. Boyhood flashbacks, animated in a lively pastel palette and underscored by western pop music, morph into a more abstract style as the war intrudes on Amin’s family’s life. 

Archival footage reminds us of the rapidly changing political upheaval in Afghanistan and Russia in the 1980’s.

In Animatic (animated storyboard) style, we watch the war in the street – a montage of impressionist black and white silhouettes of pedestrians, buildings collapsing behind them. 

FLEE: a delicate portrait in rolled into an animated documentary from NEON

Art director Jess Nicholls and animation director Kenneth Ladekjær use these ghostly abstractions to illustrate all the dark moments of Amin’s story.

First Amin’s father is arrested and disappeared, then the family endures a failed escape and years of separations. Amin’s older brother Abbas, living in Sweden, mortgages his future sending money to finance numerous attempts to smuggle the whole family to Europe.

Their first escape is to Russia on a tourist Visa. They arrive just as the wall comes down and the Soviet economy collapses. Once their Visas expire, they are victimized by corrupt police and eventually traffickers. 

The sisters are smuggled to Sweden, barely surviving their transport in a freight container.

Next Amin, his mother and brother, fled Russia by truck, then walked across the frozen Estonian border to sail across the Baltic sea to Sweden. After a harrowing sea voyage, the cruise ship which rescues them, alerts the Estonian border police, who take them back.

The next time they try, Abbas hires a high-end human trafficker, but can only afford one escape – Amin’s. Circumstances land him in Denmark, not Sweden.

Most importantly Amin must destroy his counterfeit Russian passport and seek asylum, with a cover story that his whole family is dead. Drilled to perfection, Amin never stops telling this story until his interviews with Rasmussen.

His free life in the West, as an outed gay man with a loving fiancée, is now in a different closet: the consequences of the life-saving cover story he’s afraid to “out” lest he be expelled from his host country.

The beauty of Amin and Rasmussen’s film is the seemingly spontaneous discoveries as Amin sorts through his layers of truth and memory to emotionally free himself.  

Grappling with survivor guilt; a cover story he can never reveal; and the goal to live up to his family’s sacrifice by succeeding in his career, has blunted Amin’s ability to experience happiness, not to mention commit to his fiancée’s plan to buy a permanent country home.

The sequence of Amin’s first time at a gay club is the most celebratory and uplifting scene you will see this year.

A hopeful coda ends this portrait of an unforgettable character.

Rasmussen and ‘Amin’ share screenwriting credits. Uno Helmersson’s string-inflected original score brilliantly increases our identification with Amin. A clever edit by Janus Billeskov Jansen, whose work include Oscar nominated films Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt (2013), Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) propels this deeply moving story.

Directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen

Executive Produced by #RizAhmed and #NikolajCosterWaldau

Produced by Monica Hellström, Signe Byrge Sørensen

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[Film Reviewer Robin Menken is a Screenmancer Contributor.]

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