Amin fled Afghanistan in his late teens after his father went missing. With the help of smugglers, he found himself in Russia where he waited for months before he could make his way to Denmark. Flee tells more than just his flight: this animated documentary reveals the deep scars that remain inside him and the necessary secret that threatens to turn the life he has built upside down.
“If I had stayed, they probably would have killed me too,” Amin says, after recounting the deaths of all of his family members. Its tone is that of a confession. It also looks like the one used in therapy. Flee, as told by director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, straddles the two.
Amin’s life changed with the end of the war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, as the Mujahedin gained in influence. His father is kidnapped without his family knowing whether he is dead or alive. The army forcibly enlists the men and adolescents, so that the young people flee at full speed as soon as soldiers show up in a public place.
Fleeing becomes a matter of life and death for Amin who ends up in Moscow, a year after the fall of the communist regime. Without papers, he must avoid the police or try to escape as soon as he sees an agent. Russia was bloodless at the time. The supermarkets are empty. People are hungry. The situation has its advantages: the corrupt police officers turn a blind eye when money can be passed on to them.
For months, Amin lived in fear and boredom, in a Moscow apartment, until, after trying – unsuccessfully – to join his brother in Sweden, he traveled to Denmark with the help of ‘a smuggler. It is there that he will rebuild his life, keeping silent about what he has lived. By also keeping a secret imposed by its clandestine immigration.
Cut off from himself
Flee is much more than the story of a refugee, it is the intimate story of a man cut off in part from his identity. “Most people can’t even imagine how running away in this way can affect you, what it means for your relationships with other people, how it destroys you,” Amin says.
Jonas Poher Rasmussen tells Amin’s story in the form of a realistic cartoon in which he incorporates archival footage. The shock is sometimes brutal: if the animation allows you to enter the intimacy of the main protagonist, it also allows a healthy distance from the horrors that the film tells while the archival footage filmed in Russia or Afghanistan shows the misery and death crudely.
This back and forth between the two types of images feeds the film, which nonetheless focuses on Amin’s intimate trajectory. He reveals himself little by little by telling for the first time the truth about his past, but also reveals the repercussions on his adult life, among others in his relationship with Kasper, his lover of Danish origin. Flee, having already won several awards, represents Denmark for the Oscar for best international film. It is a powerful work about breaks in the soul and sometimes unexpected comfort from those we love.
Indoors. On view this Friday at the Cinéma du Parc and across Quebec in early 2022.
Documentary
Flee
Jonas Poher Rasmussen
1 h 23