In documentary, animation helps tell refugee’s story
Animated documentaries can be rare, but often the medium of animation is the best, and only, choice for a nonfiction story. In the award-winning “Flee,” Denmark’s official selection for the Academy Awards this year, the animation isn’t just what gives the film its sense of immediacy, it’s what makes it possible in the first place.
Directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, the narrative of “Flee” tells the story of Amin Nawabi, an Afghan refugee who has made his life in Denmark. The interview recording is casual, a conversation between old friends who have known each other since they were teens. But what’s fascinating is that Rasmussen choose to include, and animate, these tiny behind-the-scenes moments.
In a filmed documentary, these glimpses of the cinematic apparatus are seemingly casual, often meant to call attention to the film’s construction, letting the audience in on the process and conferring a greater sense of “authenticity.” But when these moments are animated, the extra effort to hand-draw and animate each cell makes it something else altogether. These breaks and stops in the interview are a part of the storytelling, and “Flee” is a film about a man finally telling his own life story: a personal confession of a deeply held and traumatic journey to himself.
As Amin details his life as young boy growing up in Afghanistan, Rasmussen shows us who he is today: an accomplished academic mulling over a postdoc position at Princeton, a gay man in a committed relationship with his boyfriend Kasper, deciding whether or not to settle down in a life of domesticity. But it’s how Amin got from that one point in his life to this vastly different point that makes up the drama of the film.
Rasmussen employs archival footage as Amin tells his story, using news footage and other imagery to show the realities of the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s that led to the disappearance of Amin’s father. Eventually, Amin, his siblings and his mother escape Afghanistan, landing in Moscow with a tourist visa, a small amount of money and vague plans to make their way to Sweden. What ensues over the years is an unbelievably harrowing journey of attempted immigration through illegal human traffickers that leaves the family scattered across Europe, and Amin on his own in an entirely foreign country.
The details of Amin’s story add to the lived-in drama of his odyssey, but also deeply humanize this refugee tale. Amin explains how the family watched endless Mexican telenovelas while hiding out from the corrupt Russian cops in Moscow. He confesses to his boyhood crush on action star Jean-Claude Van Damme, which helped him understand his own identity as a gay man. He describes the terrible details of being trafficked, but one of the most poignant moments is his embarrassment while stranded on a sinking ship in the Baltic Sea as a cruise liner full of people gazes down on them.
As this tale unfolds, it becomes clear that animation is the only medium for this film creating an immediacy and intimacy. Every detail included, whether memories that
Amin chooses to share or the animated snippets of Jonas and Amin’s conversation, are crucial elements in making “Flee”
such a powerfully humane and urgently told film about immigrants, refugees and the desire not just to survive, but indeed, to thrive.