Mark Reviews Movies: FLEE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 2, 2021

For more than 20 years, Amin has been living in Copenhagen. He now is in his mid-30s, has achieved a post-graduate degree of education, is invited to speak internationally, and lives in a comfortable apartment in the city with the man who will soon become his husband. Amin has a story, of course, about fleeing an Afghanistan under Taliban rule as a teenager, and it's one that of which he doesn't often speak. Flee allows him to finally tell that story with honesty—and a few conditions.

From some of this, it should be obvious that Amin's story won't be easy to tell, because there could be repercussions. For starters, we only ever learn his first name—if it's even his authentic one in the first place. Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, a longtime friend of the film's subject, opens his documentary with a note that certain names and places have been changed, in order to protect certain people.

Right from the beginning, matters are already complicated and obfuscated, and then, we meet Amin, who appears, not as a flesh-and-blood person, but as an animated character. The rest of the film, apart from some archival and news footage, plays out in this choppy style of animation. Rasmussen actually filmed footage of his interviews with Amin, which the filmmaker proves in a final shot that transitions from animation to the real world, showing us that the image and the shot setup of the unseen live-action footage and the animation are the same (One assumes the standard holds for the other interview and fly-on-the-wall scenes). For some reason, though, the director couldn't show his subject's face, and from that realization, the air of mystery surrounding this tale is established.

The film's form, then, defines its intentions and purpose. Here, we need to hear Amin's story, which spans much longer than the 20-odd years of the official narrative of his life and reveals how system after system betrayed his basic humanity. The official story—that Amin escaped Afghanistan, found his way to Denmark, and was granted asylum as a refugee—is true on the most basic definition of the truth, if it's left unexamined. It's also a hopeful one, despite the toll of everything that comes with being a refugee.

His father was murdered. Then, his sister was abducted, and after that, his mother, brother, and other sister were killed. Somehow, Amin survived, and somehow even more inexplicably, he found himself in Denmark, as an unaccompanied minor, and was provided safety and opportunities that he realized with fierce determination. It's a dreadful but optimistic story—the kind that no government could deny as the authentic and legally defined one of a refugee.

The animation here is stylized beyond the sharp lines, the bold colors, and the skipped-frame motion. The haze of memory—or, at least, that's what we assume it is at first—shows a young Amin, seen only in roughly sketched silhouette, running amidst collapsing buildings with other broadly human forms of lines. Such scenes occur occasionally here, but there are other scenes—most of them—as clear and full of color as the interview sections. The film's style is piecing together the deeper mystery of Amin's history, and we don't even realize it.

The actual truth of Amin's background isn't tricky, but the potential legal consequences of it becoming public certainly are. There's a moment here, in which Rasmussen and Amin stop their interview, because the director needs to clarify a few details about Amin's story that he believed were unassailable fact. In that moment, we can almost sense Rasmussen making the decision to transform the entirety of the film into what it is now—rough, yes, but also stylistically consistent and somewhat daring. It asks us to find the truth, not only in Amin's story and how the specific details don't necessarily change anything about who he is, but also through this layer of artificiality molding a harrowing, real-life tale.

It's a necessary choice for Rasmussen, perhaps, in order to protect his subject and, more importantly, his friend. In depicting Amin's story—from life in Afghanistan throughout momentous political changes, to a most tenuous time in a post-Soviet Moscow filled with overly eager and corrupt cops, to a few encounters with heartless human traffickers—through animation, the actual events take on the unreal feeling that Amin himself must have experienced, actually living through these moments as a child and a teenager. On a gut level, there's a kind of hyper-realism to the film's flashbacks, because they stylistically represent and present Amin's subjective experience of them.

As for the interviews and Amin's daily life with his fiancé, Rasmussen's decision—as essential as it may be from a moral perspective—hits a bit of a wall. The animation here isn't detailed enough to truly communicate Amin's emotions, which run deeper and deeper as he finally reveals the truth and comes to terms with what that truth has meant for the course of his life, as well as for the relationship with his soon-to-be husband. We can hear it in Amin's voice, of course, but the layer of the film's form becomes a barrier in its most intimate moments of emotion and revelation.

Still, the film does most of what it sets out to do. Flee communicates Amin's story as he experienced it and, for the world to see, to serve as a reminder that there are moral truths of human rights that go deeper than legal definitions.

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