Flee: A Perilous Journey and a Timely Tale

Flee is a gripping animated feature documentary that recounts one man’s harrowing ordeal as a child fleeing Afghanistan and allows him to finally come to terms with his past, sharing a long-held secret that threatens to overturn the life he’s built for himself.

A few minutes into the film we learn that Amin Nawabi (a pseudonym) and the film’s director, Jonas Poher Rasmussen, are longtime friends who met in high school. That foundation of trust is essential as Amin opens up to Rasmussen and the camera as he never has before.

We jump right into Amin’s earliest memories of childhood in Kabul, Afghanistan in the early-mid 1980s. It’s a happy sequence as a young Amin gleefully skips down the streets wearing his sister’s dress, music blasting through his headphones. His house is a tranquil place with a front garden where he plays with his siblings. His mother is inside cooking dinner. He remembers the way she would tenderly stroke his hair. However, when the filmmaker asks where his father is in this picture, Amin closes up. He’s not quite ready to go there. He returns to it later, describing how his father was taken by the Afghan government and subsequently disappeared.

In a storage room in the present, Amin riffles through boxes and pulls out an old journal containing his story, written when he first arrived in Denmark years ago. He reads aloud a section: after the Mujahideen seized power in Afghanistan, they killed his family. (Spoilers now ahead) Later, Amin reveals this to be a lie told in desperation and on a trafficker’s orders as the only way to secure safe refuge. His mother and siblings are alive, although they remain scattered around Europe. The horror and the burden of having to keep such a terrible secret all these years, all while trying to build a new life and new relationships, is unfathomable. Amin recalls once choosing to trust this secret with his (ex-)boyfriend, who threatened to tell the police.

The weight of Amin’s big secret and the possible consequences of revealing the truth also make it abundantly clear that animation is indeed the best format for this film, as it helps protect the identities of Amin and his loved ones. More than that, however, the style suits the storytelling extremely well, depicting Amin’s memories in a way live film could not. There’s a smattering of live footage mostly comprised of archival news broadcasts, but otherwise the film relies on animation. Flee uses a couple different types of animation, including black-and-white sketches as well as 2D in the style of graphic novels.

Amin’s interviews with Rasmussen are intercut with scenes from the present, in which Amin and his fiancé Kasper work through their own conflict. The two are house-hunting, but Amin is somewhat reluctant and avoids confronting the issue by throwing himself into his Princeton postdoctoral, which keeps him in the U.S. for months at a time. We understand his reactions and choices with more clarity as the film progresses and Amin opens up more about the lingering effects of trauma, including the burden of guilt and pressure.

The film deftly weaves past and present together so that we, and Amin himself, come to understand how events and their emotional consequences have shaped him into who and where he is today. He is able to confront his fear of buying a house with Kasper; he acknowledges the guilt and pressure he feels to put his career first, and the reasons behind it; and he finally acknowledges that he deserves to be happy.

Despite the heavy nature of Amin’s story, during his years-long perilous journey there are lighter moments of joy which remind us that, through it all, he is also just a boy coming of age. We see Amin as a carefree kid in Afghanistan listening to pop music, his bedroom decorated with posters of Jean-Claude Van Damme. We hear about his first real crush, on a boy with whom he was trafficked to freedom. Later, Amin recounts his first time going to a gay club. These coming-of-age experiences connect us with Amin, reminding viewers that he is more than his ordeal, that refugee is not an identity but a crisis that can happen to any one of us. It’s a prevalent reminder when there are millions of people every day forced to endure such terrifying journeys and horrendous conditions in the hopes of finding home—in Amin’s own words, “somewhere safe…somewhere you can stay, and you don’t have to move on.” And shouldn’t that be everyone’s right?

Flee recently made Oscars history as the first film to be nominated for Best Animated Film, Best Documentary, and Best International Feature in the same year. Flee is available for viewing on Amazon Prime.