A long-standing friendship between a Danish film-maker and an Afghan refugee bears fruit decades later in the animated documentary Flee, a personal coming-of-age story with deeper social and political dimensions. Building strong critical momentum since its feted Sundance premiere, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s highly assured third feature has already won multiple prizes and a prestige boost as Denmark’s official Oscar submission. This week it was shortlisted by the Academy in both the Best International Film and Best Documentary categories. Touching on timely issues including illegal immigration, LGBT rights and recent grim developments in Afghanistan, Flee is a generally compelling, moving work with strong awards potential. Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau also give the project extra star power as executive producers, and are set to voice an upcoming English-language version.
Indebted in style to innovative docu-mation hybrids like Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir (2008) and Keith Maitland’s Tower (2009), this Danish-led international co-production uses animation to conjure up the traumatic memories of “Amin Nawabi”, a child refugee who escaped war-ravaged Afghanistan for Denmark in his teens. Narrating his own story in a free-ranging audio interview with Rasmussen that feels like a delicate therapy session at times, Amin is a real person but his name has been changed to protect him and his family, for reasons that soon become clear. The choice to use animated avatars also makes it easier to conceal his real identity and share his emotionally raw confessions. As Oscar Wilde observed, give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.
The first flashbacks in Flee find Amin and his family growing up in Kabul in the 1980s, enjoying a relatively stable and happy life despite the explosive backdrop of Soviet military and political occupation. Amin recalls realizing he was gay from a young age, laughing in hindsight at the early erotic stirrings he felt at the sight of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s oiled, ripped torso. Even so, he was deeply unsure how to articulate such a shameful, dangerous secret in a religiously conservative culture where no word for homosexuality even exists.
In the early 1990s, as Russian troops withdraw and Afghanistan implodes into civil war, Amin’s pilot father is arrested by government agents. Apparently murdered by the regime, he never returns home. With the Taliban poised to seize Kabul, Amin and his remaining family engineer a frantic escape to Moscow, where they begin an extended season in Hell that stretches into years. Living as illegal immigrants in a cramped high-rise apartment, they are terrorized by crooked Russian police who routinely shake down undocumented foreigners for money and squalid sexual favors.
Desperate to make an illegal crossing to Sweden, where they have family connections, Amin and his siblings put their shaky faith in brutal Russian traffickers who charge huge sums for a place in suffocating cargo containers or on perilous, leaky, overcrowded boats. After several failed attempts to escape, including an enforced spell in a grim refugee camp in Estonia, Amin finally makes a successful trip to Denmark, where he claims asylum. His new life involves learning Danish, going to school, and becoming friends with Rasmussen. Still struggling to accept his sexuality, he finally finds a liberating welcome in Copenhagen’s gay clubs.
Between flashbacks, Flee includes vignettes of Amin’s current life in Denmark, where he shares a sweet, committed relationship with his partner Kasper. Rasmussen tries to inject some jeopardy into these scenes by highlighting unresolved friction between the couple over divergent house-buying and career plans, but these minor domestic obstacles inevitably feel like First World Problems set against the horrors of Amin’s refugee past. These are the film’s weakest sections, straining for a dramatic tension that dissolves into bathos. Unlike Waltz With Bashir, which left knotty moral and political questions hanging in the air, Flee seems a little too keen to wrap up its narrative with a neat, feelgood resolution. This makes it a lesser, more formally conventional film but arguably a more likely Oscar candidate.
Rasmussen sticks with a fairly traditional 2D animation style for most of Flee, digressing into looser, more impressionistic graphics during moments of high drama and disorienting emotional turbulence. In a witty stylistic conceit, the animated interview sequences include clapperboard shots, camera shake and blurry focus, artfully mimicking the visual grammar of documentary reportage. Spliced into the cartoon material, live-action newsreel footage lends broader context to the core personal story, though a little more detail on Afghanistan’s tortuous history as a perennial football in proxy superpower wars would have been welcome.
Deft editing by Danish maestro Janus Billeskov Jansen (The Hunt, The Act of Killing, Another Round) helps make Flee a slick visual package overall, notably in shots that smoothly blend filmed footage with animation. Uno Helmersson’s heart-tugging, slightly syrupy score is mitigated by warmly nostalgic blasts of period-specific Scandi-pop including Roxette’s Joyride and A-ha’s Take on Me, the latter complete with winking allusions to the song’s iconic animated video. In times of trouble, vintage Norwegian Europop makes everything alright.
Director: Jonas Poher Rasmussen
Screenwriters: Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Amin Nawabi
Producers: Monica Hellström, Signe Byrge Sørensen
Executive producers: Riz Ahmed, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Danny Gabai, Natalie Farrey, Jannat Gargi, Hayley Pappas, Matt Ippolito, Philippa Kowarsky
Editor: Janus Billeskov Jansen
Animation director: Kenneth Ladekjær
Animation producer: Charlotte De La Gournerie
Art director: Jess Nichols
Music: Uno Helmersson
World Sales: 30West, Cinephil
Production companies: Final Cut for Real (Denmark), Sun Creature Studio (Denmark), Vivement Lundi! (France), Mostfilm (Sweden), Mer Film (Norway), VICE Studios (UK), Left Handed Films (UK), RYOT Films (US), Arte France (France)
In Danish, Russian, Dari
90 minutes
