Refugee stories are not always obscured by our media, but they are often distorted, with broadcast news segments and sensational dramas twisting the extreme oppression and abuse experienced by migrants into entertainment for those of us with the right passports. Danish director Jonas Poher Rasmussen avoids this tendency in his latest project by infusing both of his professional mediums—documentary film and radio—with animation in order to grant his subject crucial anonymity. The resulting documentary, Flee, is both a collage film about a young man who struggles with disclosing his past as an Afghani refugee, and a candid collaboration between longtime friends.
Rasmussen grew up with Amin (a pseudonym to protect his identity and status) in a small Danish village, where the latter arrived alone at 16 and began living with a foster family. To get to Denmark, Amin had to endure deep suffering, and to receive asylum status, he had to tell the right story.
Now, well into successful careers in film and academia, respectively, Rasmussen approaches Amin about finally sharing his past on the record. But the limits of disclosure have burdened Amin for the majority of his life and threaten his closest relationships, especially with his understanding boyfriend, Kasper. Aware that he was gay from the age of 5, Amin had kept a different secret for much longer: He told no one he met since receiving asylum status, not even Kasper, about the specifics of his life before arriving in Denmark.
Flee is an experiment in reimagining what the process of disclosure can offer to those tasked with reliving traumatic experiences. Combining archival footage with voiceover and intricate animated passages depicting both Amin and Rasmussen in the present—and Amin and his immediate family in the past—the film forgoes the voyeuristic gawking customary to many tales of refugee horror. Instead, we’re asked to examine the failed institutions, particularly in Russia and Europe, that exploit and neglect the most vulnerable. Rasmussen is just as interested in how Amin has processed or suppressed what was taking place around him during his years-long attempt to escape Afghanistan, then Russia, after the Taliban gained control over his native country in the 80s.
What’s most arresting about Flee isn’t its animated sequences, but Rasmussen’s detailed and attentive recording of Amin’s vocal expressions. However conversant he is in several languages, from Dari to Russian to Danish, Amin has a way of letting silence interrupt. He allows his voice to trail off, grumbles in the face in confrontation, and withholds difficult information from both Rasmussen and Kasper until the last possible moment. We learn, in time, how this evasive communication style once protected him; it’s in his voice that we start to hear the ways past and present threaten to forestall Amin’s future, and how a nonlinear eruption of time—all the hours lost, borrowed, and stolen back along his harrowing journey—freezes him in a relentless present. That he’s willing to begin to break that cycle to finally release his secrets to an old friend is a gift we’re lucky to share in.
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