An immensely powerful, humanising documentary about one Afghan’s escape from 1980s Kabul, made all the more thrilling and suspenseful through its animation
It’s a genuine thrill to encounter a film as exciting and immediate as Flee. The true story at its centre is a harrowing and suspenseful refugee narrative of loss and resilience, and director Jonas Poher Rasmussen could have brought it to the screen in many ways, almost all of them conventionally easier than the one he finally chose. Rasmussen’s friend, known in the film as Amin, is an Afghan refugee who agrees to share how he made his way from war-torn Kabul in the 80s to now, living a settled, open life in Denmark as a gay man, one he’d never thought was possible.
In animating the interviews with Amin and the various events being recalled, Rasmussen finds an unusually immersive way to pull us in even closer, one that’s both emotionally involving and artfully realised. Amin’s childhood, as with many others like him, was interrupted in the late 80s as conflict forced him and his family to escape their home, finding their way to Moscow.
