Direction: Jonas Poher Rasmussen
Country: Denmark
Directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Flee embraces a documentary-animation hybridity that strikes with heartfelt intimacy. It tells the haunting true story of Amin Nawabi, a 36-year-old gay Afghan who once established himself in Denmark as an unaccompanied minor. He's about to get married to his long-time boyfriend, Kaspar, but first he needs to go over his distressing past by telling his story.
Like in a therapy session, Amin harks back to his earliest memories of a war-torn Kabul in the mid 1980s. He explains how he and his family were forced to flee to Moscow, then put in an abandoned building with inhumane conditions in Estonia after a traumatic attempt to reach Sweden by boat, and then sent back to Russia again, where they stayed illegally after paying the corrupt authorities. Following those tough times, he arrives in Copenhagen with a false passport and is given asylum as a refugee who had lost all his family, a lie he had been keeping for years. He also opens up about his sexual awakening.
The particular care given to the images is preponderant in this poignant, profound and touching account of a life marked by fear, trauma, loss, bias, a quest for identity, and an urge for integration. It’s hard not to be scared or overwhelmed during the description of these hard-hitting events, but the film seduces by the stylized realism with which it’s presented. The rhythm of the storytelling is stable, increasing our interest in an emotional story that many will relate to.
