Susan Granger’s review of “Flee” (Neon)
Triple Oscar-nominated as Best International Film, Best Documentary Feature, and Best Animation, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s “Flee” chronicles a refugee’s journey from war-torn Afghanistan to Denmark.
Based on extensive audio interviews with a gay man using the pseudonym ‘Amin Nawabi,’ who has known director Jonas Poher Rasmussen since they were teenagers, it begins with Amin’s heartfelt assertion that “Home is somewhere safe.”
Amin grew up in Kabul in the 1980s, flying kites and dancing down the street in his sister’s nightshirt, but his life took a precarious turn after the repressive Mujahideen seized power. His parents were killed and his sisters were kidnapped. So he fled to Soviet Russia, where unscrupulous human traffickers left him imprisoned in a squalid Estonian asylum center.
Eventually, 15-year-old Amin was granted refugee status in Denmark, when he met Rasmussen on a school bus. Their friendship grew over the years and, eventually, Amin confided how he once asked a Danish Red Cross social worker for medication to ‘cure’ him of his ‘unnatural’ sexual attraction to men.
What makes this docudrama so extraordinary is Rasmussen’s use of hand-drawn animation from Copenhagen’s Sun Creature Studio to depict fragmented sequences, like being trapped in a sealed cargo container, that could not be filmed in a normal documentary, along with authentic news footage, archival material and Swedish composer Uno Helmersson’s score.
One particularly heart-tugging sequence involves a group of migrants stranded on a small vessel that’s spotted by a large Norwegian cruise ship, detailing the eager expectations of the refugees and the bleak dispatch with which they are evacuated.
Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau voice Amin Nawabi and director Jonas Poher Rasmusen in the English-language version. In the press notes, Ahmed explains: “This fulfills the highest calling of storytelling, which is to remind us through the force of its imagination that there is no ‘us and them,’ only ‘us.’”
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Flee” is an uplifting, emotionally engaging 8, streaming free to subscribers on Hulu and available to rent/buy on Prime Video.
