Flee

"A personal account, but no footage. A few years ago, Danish director Jonas Poher Rasmussen finally managed to get his childhood friend, Amin, to talk about his troubled past. On one condition: his anonymity must be fully preserved. During these lengthy interviews, only Amin’s voice was recorded. He tells of how he invented a whole new life for himself, hiding from those around him the fact that he had fled Afghanistan in the late 1980s when he was just a boy and the Mujahideen had seized power. Now 36, Amin is a recognised academic in Denmark and in a relationship with a man. Rasmussen retraces this wild journey in the form of an animated documentary: Flee visually fills in the gaps by moving between semi-realistic drawings (most of the film), scribbles and rough sketches (the most blurred moments in Amin’s mind, or the worst periods of his life) and live-action archive footage. It is an unsettling technique, which accentuates the harshness of reality by infusing it with fiction. The effect is striking and immersive, a thunderous marriage of form and content. Had it been shot live, Flee would certainly have worked. But the animation reinforces every directorial choice: even the ‘face-to-camera’ sequences between the director and Amin – which in another format could easily have come across as emotionally manipulative – take on an unexpected evocative power here. By turns a heart-wrenching survival film and a coming-of-age story, Flee addresses both the refugee crisis and the trauma of growing up whilst discovering your own homosexuality in a country that does not tolerate it. Above all, it is a never maudlin, masterfully restrained thriller about the violence of the uncertainty and chaos of the world. The story of a man haunted by his past and the lies he was forced to tell, now alone amidst the ruins of his memories. Rarely has introspection been so universal." (François Léger; premiere.fr)