Flee/Flugt

Denmark/France/Sweden 2021

Dir: Jonas Rasmussen

90 mins

Rating: M

Flee is an animated documentary from Denmark. Those words together mark it as unusual, but so do these: it’s nominated for Oscars in three distinct categories: best international feature, best documentary feature and best animated feature. Not sure that’s ever happened before. ...

The animation style is mixed, from line drawings that look like cave-wall paintings, to expressionist effects to hyper-realist animations that appear to be traced on real footage. There are also grainy bits of real news footage.

Rasmussen will use anything that serves his storytelling needs, turning it into a sort of collage. That makes the film visually engaging, confronting, and kind of beautiful.

Flee is a remarkable achievement. It takes a difficult topic and makes it very engaging. It becomes a sort of documentary thriller, with epic scenes as Amin and his family travel in the hands of people smugglers. It is heartbreaking and sobering, especially in Australia, where the difference between a migrant and a refugee often comes down to a matter of opinion.

Paul Byrnes is a film critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Refugee stories have a tragic, crushing universality about them: dank cargo-holds and shipping containers, thuggish human traffickers, the desperation of families torn apart by war and persecution. But in the telling of one such story — that of Amin Nawabi (Daniel Karimyar, Fardin Mijdzadeh), an Afghan academic settled in Denmark but still shaken by the escape he made during his teenage years — documentary filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen has somehow found a way inside these horrors that’s truly unique. Flee jolts to life via swirling hand-drawn animation, which is not what you’d expect. It’s also a memory play, a therapy session and, most subtly, a coming-out comedy. Unspooling like a hush of secrets about to be disclosed after decades, Flee is a stirring, haunted reminiscence like no other. ...

An extraordinary blend of personal reflection and inspired craft, Flee is a harrowing child’s-eye adventure that lends lyricism to the plight of migrants while showing there’s always a new way to make a documentary.

 Joshua Rothkopf. Empire Magazine