Flee: A Truly Unique Documentary

Flee premiered at Sundance this year. It is a Danish, animated documentary that follows the story of Amin, a gay refugee from Afghanistan. Check out the trailer:

Jezebel has a wonderful write-up of the film:

The most moving film I’ve seen since I can’t even remember when is Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary Flee. It tells the story of Amin, whose family left Afghanistan during the Mujahideen’s war with the Soviet Army. They fled to Russia, the only country that would grant them a tourist visa, and from there attempted to make it to Sweden, only to be thwarted and effectively imprisoned in Estonia. The animation allows Amin’s contemporary interview to flow into depictions of his past. The timeline compression is nearly psychedelic, as we leap from Amin’s life as a refugee to his present as an engaged gay man. For so much of Amin’s life, self-preservation meant identity-amputation—never having a real home meant that his family was the only thing that grounded him, and so he risked being effectively hollowed out by coming out. Having to obscure his biography became a motif in Amin’s life (the traffickers that eventually got him out of Afghanistan made it clear that he could never disclose his past or that his family was still alive). The very act of recounting his story is cathartic and revelatory: “Only now that I’m telling you about it do I realize how hard it’s been,” he admits to Rasmussen.

Flee is a terrific case for the power of well-told personal narrative—the challenges of the refugee, the police-profiled, the closeted queer is explained without ambiguity. As a bonus, Flee features some incredible music cues—as he’s being trafficked to what he thinks is Sweden (but ends up being Denmark) alongside a guy that he has a clandestine crush on, Roxette’s “Joyride” plays (“Hello, you fool I love you/C’mon join the joyride,” goes the hook). Even better is a scene depicting his first visit to a gay club scored by one of the most poignant dance songs after crafted, Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo.” Flee never hits a false note or wastes a moment.

The theatrical film release has not been set, though the file was picked up by Neon. Actors Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones) will dub the film into English for U.S. distribution.

-KitJ