ANIMATION; 1hr 23min (Danish with subtitles)
DIRECTED BY: Jonas Poher Rasmussen
Look homeward: Amin
Evocatively animated, intercut with illustrative video footage and conducted as a series of in-depth conversations between Danish director Jonas Poher Rasmussen and his long-time friend Amin Nawabi, Flee’s clean lines cover multiple bases. Although he is in a loving relationship with the man he will marry, Amin (a pseudonym) has never told anyone the story of his hard-fought escape from mujahideen-ravaged Afghanistan to Denmark as a teenager two decades before. It is an experience too painful for him to have addressed — a litany of traumas in which the deliverance of survival is shadowed by the psychic injuries that being spared can carry.
Having mastered resolve the hard way, Amin doesn’t spare himself in his descriptions of what happened to him and his family. The inhumanity of deprivation, the secrets that inhumanity has forced him to keep and the ever-present sense of danger that helped shape the person he has become are still very much alive. Rasmussen does the hellfire full justice, his responsive animation a work of art charged with anger and compassion. Co-written by the two friends, Amin’s story is one more act of resolve in a life demarcated by cold-bloodedness and loss. “Most people,” he says without rancour, “can’t even begin to imagine how fleeing like that affects you…”
