TIFF 2021: Flee
TIFF 2021Flee by Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen is an animated documentary about the refugee experience of an Afghan man named Amin (not his real name) who fled during Kabul with his family in the 1980s while he was a minor. What strikes you first as a gimmick – the fusion of 2-D animation to the documentary field of filmmaking – quickly gives way to being a fascinating, brilliant, and effective means of storytelling. Its style is uncomplicated enough. Flee seems to merely animate on top of casual two-camera interview footage, but this technique instantly becomes turns into its own unique, important, and fertile storytelling form. The style has multiple advantages, firstly allowing Amin to preserve his anonymity, but also engaging the audience in with an immediate eye-catching and colourful hook. Flee also allows original animated sequences to flesh out Amin’s recollection of his childhood. The technique and style altogether provides a quite unforgettable human story.
Amin’s account follows him from his youth in Kabul to years of hiding illegally in Russia. He and his family are driven from their home by elements of chaos as Afghanistan fell into disarray, terror, and uncertainty following the Russian pull-out in the 1980s. After his dad was taken away by officials never to return, Amin’s family fled to Russia where they would shelter until able to figure out passage to Sweden, the home of Amin’s eldest brother. What unfolds is a harrowing representation of two things. Firstly, a lifestyle that is seldom portrayed in film and TV. Amin and his family live in a monotonous, suffocating bubble. They are the unseen, disregarded can of soup that ends up at the back of the cupboard for a decade. Unaccounted for. Uncared for. From this shadowed corner of Russia, they wait until they can figure out funding and arrangements with traffickers. It’s a jaw-dropping recollection of dangerous trials and marginalisation.
Secondly, Flee vividly articulates the impact that such a dehumanising experience manifests. Although present-day Amin shows emotional healing and an externally ‘normal’-looking life, he is a human hobbled together by resilience, toughness, determination, and love of family, and these things mercifully managed to be greater than the sum of his demoralising life experiences. Amin’s interview shows precisely where his defensiveness, ultra-guarded psyche, and trust issues come from. As an adult, he has confidence, trust, and connection issues that more closely resemble the attachment anxieties of a newly adopted toddler, but it’s completely understandable given the vibrant retelling of his story.
Flee is as poignant as it is harrowing. Amin’s story as well as the bold style of its animation casts light on news stories of people being smuggled in shipping containers. However, it also establishes a humanity to the stories that is seldom understood. The layers of this story go deep, deep into the human condition and the psychological strife bore by communities of the world who are impacted by brutal public policy and civil war. What a news broadcast may frame in political and policy terms for two minutes provides no insight at a human level. The value of such a synopsis is no more complete than reading the first page of a novel. Rasmussen’s brilliant film, and Amin’s touching story, speak to a greater tragedy – that of youth’s development being tamped down and silenced because of lost years hiding. After all, Amin lost a decade of his life and came out the other side not only with emotional and mental health scars but missing years of development in his sexuality, friendships, and education. Flee is an impactful gem that gets better and better and more and more important long after the credits roll.