Flee

How do you define ​“home”? Is it a place, a per­son, a feel­ing, or all of those things and none at the same time? The com­plex, still some­what unan­swered ques­tion gives Flee its emo­tion­al teth­er – a hand­some and bold por­trait of a young, gay Afghan man telling his sto­ry for the first time.

It’s the new fea­ture from Dan­ish doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er Jonas Poher Ras­mussen, an almost entire­ly ani­mat­ed doc inter­view­ing his long­time friend Amin Nawabi (using a pseu­do­nym to pro­tect his iden­ti­ty) about the jour­ney that got him here – escap­ing Afghanistan in the late 1980s, los­ing track of his fam­i­ly and slow­ly find­ing him­self in amid and against a fab­ri­cat­ed nar­ra­tive fed to him by human traffickers.

Ani­ma­tion at once lets Amin keep his pri­va­cy while allow­ing Ras­mussen to ele­vate his sto­ry, which, when speak­ing about peo­ple who have been forced to flee their home coun­tries in dire and unjust cir­cum­stances, too often reduced to num­bers and sta­tis­tics. A less­er film­mak­er would have labelled this anoth­er ​“refugee sto­ry” and shoved it in a bleak lit­tle box.

We get to know Amin through all the facets of his life that mat­ter – the head­lines that made him leave Afghanistan and end up in Den­mark (where he met Ras­mussen as a teen) but also his expe­ri­ence com­ing of age as a gay man try­ing so des­per­ate­ly not to dis­ap­point his fam­i­ly, an anchor in an oth­er­wise unsta­ble world.

The best com­ing-of-age sto­ries lis­ten to the com­plex feel­ings wrapped up in those land­mark moments, in which tiny details hold just as much weight as major events. The glee of dis­cov­er­ing A‑ha’s ​‘Take on Me’ as a kid, the way you look at your part­ner as he cooks you din­ner in your tiny, tem­po­rary home. In Flee there isn’t mere­ly trau­ma or joy – there’s antic­i­pa­tion, con­cern, guilt and hope too.

Ras­mussen brings this to life visu­al­ly with warmth and care. Faces are giv­en per­mis­sion to feel deeply, with inky blacks under­lin­ing sin­cere expres­sions while soft, sweep­ing palettes of earthy shades colour the coun­tries usu­al­ly glossed over in favour of slic­ing, clin­i­cal words. In the tur­bu­lent moments of Amin’s life, the chameleon­ic design also adapts as breath­tak­ing sul­phurous lines swarm the screen as if clos­ing in on this young man’s mind. What mat­ters is how he saw and felt it, as opposed to what the rest of the world would like to say about it.

Bal­ance is every­thing, though – this isn’t a sac­cha­rine rewrit­ing of his­to­ry, nor a ful­ly-fledged ​“fuck you” to those who deserve it. Both Ras­mussen and Amin remain aware of tone, open­ing up about how hard it can be to trust peo­ple when your life is spent being ​“adjust­ed, retained and sup­pressed” to fit an image oth­ers have cre­at­ed for you.

Flash­es of real-world footage (of protests and news bul­letins, but also the trees of an emp­ty gar­den sway­ing in the wind) ground Flee in some­thing authen­tic and raw – vul­ner­a­ble, even. More than any­thing, it’s all in Amin’s voice. In the cracks, the sighs, the occa­sion­al chuck­le as he chokes up and remem­bers every­thing nobody had ever tru­ly asked him to pro­tect before. His sto­ry is one in a mil­lion, this film a rare gift final­ly doing it justice.

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