‘Flee': Animated Immigrant Story Strikes Familiar Notes [Sundance]

Rotoscope-like animation is used to mask the identity of a gay man who escaped Afghanistan in Jonas Poher Rasmussen‘s “Flee” Rasmussen gives his John Doe the name of Amin Nawabi, he’s an Afghan refugee, his animated face isn’t his real face, but the story he tells is very real, or so we’re told. It all amounts to a film that heavily borrows from Ari Folman’s landmark animation-doc hybrid “Waltz With Bashir.” The remnants of that film’s influences are all over “Flee,” which, despite a slowly developed start does manage to become more interesting and more formidably drawn out in its final section.

“Flee,” which was supposed to have premiered at Cannes last year, plays as a sort of therapy session as Amin lies down on the director’s couch and recounts his story from childhood to adulthood, from Afghanistan to Norway. There is clearly lots of trauma, inner demons, that Amin seems reluctant to reveal, even Amin’s partner, Kasper, and his longtime friend, the director, have not known about his past until now.

Rasmussen met Amin when they were both in a Danish high school, we are told most of the classmates knew that he had fled his home country, but we’re clueless as to the circumstances which led him to go to Denmark. As Amin starts giving Rasmussen, and consequently the viewer, the details of the harrowing journey he had, escaping from Kabul to Moscow as a child, there’s always something that hold us back at a distance. Is it maybe because, via the animation gimmick, we just don’t come to know Amin truly enough to care? The visuals might have been better left off to feed our imaginations with Amin’s story.

Of course, one has to conceivably think of the possibility that Amin isn’t telling us the whole story, or maybe even lying about a lot of things. At the start, Rasmussen is under the impression that, based on what Amin told him years ago, his entire family got killed, but as the story goes along it is quite clear that didn’t happen. Amin lied, but why? We are never really told.

SCORE: B-