Flee

“Watching Amin embrace his sexuality and let himself go to the soaring tones of Daft Punk is all but guaranteed to bring a tear to your eye.”

Title: Flee (2021)
Director: Jonas Poher Rasmussen 👨🏼🇩🇰
Writer: Jonas Poher Rasmussen 👨🏼🇩🇰

Reviewed by Rafael Motamayor 👨🏽🇻🇪🇳🇴

Technical: 4.5/5

More than any other entertainment medium, animation gives creators the versatility to tell any kind of story—from abstract dramas, to painstakingly detailed children's movies, or fluid and exhilarating action blockbusters. In recent years, riveting documentaries about serious subjects have been told through animation in films like Tower (2016), Waltz With Bashir (2008), and 25 April (2015). Joining them from this year’s Sundance Film Festival is Jonas Poher Rasmussen's poignant and memorable Flee, one of the most ingenious movies to come out of Sundance in years.

"Have you ever told your story before?" Rasmussen asks a man named Amin early in the film, to which he answers "no." We quickly learn that “Amin” isn’t his real name, that in fact most of what Amin has told Rasmussen in the decades they've known each other hasn't been entirely true. But as Amin gamely takes this opportunity to address the specifics of his life, Flee becomes an incredible journey of one man's path to self-discovery, through all the setbacks and trauma that comes with the harrowing travails of being a refugee.

The use of animation to tell Amin's story is a practical choice to hide his identity as he tells his real story, but it quickly becomes clear that the medium allows Flee to play with memory in a way that no live-action documentary could. A lot of what Amin recalls is fuzzy, as he starts looking back at his past for what seems like the first time in years. So the animation responds accordingly, visualizing these memories with abstract sketches and blurry lines. But the animation serves just as well for concrete memories, reflecting Amin's precise recollection of certain events by adding details like posters and decorations in Amin's room, or showing the kids playing on the street near his childhood home in Afghanistan. These changes in art styles resonate with Amin's story, elevated by coherent editing and pitch-perfect pacing that makes the story hit as hard as it does. Rasmussen also intercuts the animated recreations with live-action archival footage, grounding the story in historical context, contrasting the intimate and personal story Amin is telling with the grander, horrifying reality happening around him.

Flee offers a clever and inventive way to work around the subject's own need for secrecy that also serves to reflect the fluidity of the story itself, in a way that feels fresh even as we've seen other documentaries tell their stories through animation before. Coming out of the film feels like a cathartic experience, not only for the director and Amin, but for the audience as well.

Gender: 2.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

Because the story focuses solely on Amin and his recollection of events, the rest of his family have only supporting roles. His sisters in particular get the short end of the stick, as they leave the story fairly early and only return for a brief scene that serves Amin's story.

Race: 5/5

The documentary tells a universal story of looking for a place to belong, but through an intrinsically minority perspective. After all, Amin has been an outsider for most of his life—whether as a gay teen in Afghanistan, or as a person of color in Russia, or as a refugee in Denmark—and it informs both the way he tells his story and who he is now.

When the story focuses on Amin's experience as a refugee in Russia, it addresses issues of racism and police abuse through his perspective as a person of color. When his family is stuck in Russia, Rasmussen charts long and slow scenes of Amin, his mother, and his siblings sitting by the door, waiting in terror for the moment the police will show up demanding either papers, or a bribe. In a later scene, Amin recounts how he and his brother were unable to help prevent a sexual assault for fear of suffering a similar fate. By using Amin's experience as a refugee, Flee tells a harrowing story of how hard it is to be at ease in a strange place when people with authority are constantly trying to make you feel like you don't belong and taking advantage of you.

Rasmussen doesn't just stop at showing us the arduous journey Amin took in his youth. He also reveals how Amin's past continues to impact his present, depicting the full spectrum of the refugee experience which doesn’t simply end because one has fled an unstable region. As Amin confesses, there are things you leave behind when you become a refugee or a migrant, including the ability to ever be fully open with someone. In one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the movie, Amin realizes he's forgetting his native tongue of Dari.

Bonus for LGBTQ: +1.00

Amin's story isn't strictly a coming-out story, but we do see him come to terms with his own sexuality as a gay man. Early in the film, Amin talks about how he grew up having a crush on Jean-Claude Van Damme and had a poster of him in his bedroom, which his brothers mistake for him simply being a fan of action movies. After this brief scene, the film brushes Amin's sexuality aside for most of the plot, as it focuses instead on the struggle to get out of Russia and into a better place. It is not until Amin finally makes it to Denmark and starts regaining some sense of normalcy that the film brings back his sexuality when he asks a Danish doctor at the refugee center if there was a medicine that would make him stop liking boys.

Viewers expecting to see more queer content may be disappointed that Flee puts his sexuality on the backburner for most of the runtime, but it makes sense that Amin couldn't afford to add another layer to his "otherness" when he was already struggling to survive as a refugee and as a person of color. It isn’t until Amin feels stable enough in Denmark that he starts taking care of himself emotionally and begins to explore his sexuality.

When Amin is eventually accepted by his family and feels encouraged enough to visit a gay nightclub, Daft Punk’s soaring “Veridis Quo” introduces a world full of possibility. We see a wide-eyed Amin surrounded by peers just dancing away their worries, and watching him embrace this facet of his identity and let himself go makes for one of the most beautiful scenes in a film this year.

Mediaversity Grade: B+ 4.33/5

Flee may not revolutionize the animated documentary, but it offers an intimate yet universal story that develops before the audience's very eyes as Amin himself comes to terms with his own past. By the time the film ends, you feel a connection to Amin that very few other narratives manage to create, a connection felt on every level of filmmaking. Roger Ebert once called movies "the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts," and Flee is a remarkable example of the medium at its most empathic.

Like Flee? Try these other titles from Sundance Film Festival 2021 featuring immigrants or the children of immigrants.

Grade: BLiMarch 9, 2021Great for: Race, Great for: LGBTQ