An interview animated instead of filmed
Flee is an animated documentary built around a single set of interviews: Jonas Poher Rasmussen sits down with a friend he has known since secondary school, granted the alias Amin Nawabi so he could finally speak about his flight from Afghanistan. Rather than restage that testimony on camera, Rasmussen renders every session as loose, ink-and-wash animation, and cuts in archival news footage of the Soviet withdrawal, the mujahideen advance and the smuggling routes across the Baltic that framed Amin’s escape. The choice of drawing over filming is not decoration; it lets a man who has spent decades performing an official version of his own past finally admit which parts were invented under duress. Eighty-three minutes long, produced across Denmark, Norway, Sweden and France, the film sets out to recover a specific, undocumented decade rather than to generalise about refugees as a category.
Two timelines, one voice
The past and present run on separate tracks that Rasmussen keeps folding into each other. In the present, Amin is planning a wedding to his partner Kasper and weighing whether to take a research post in the United States, unable to explain his own restlessness. In the past, animation recreates his childhood in Kabul under his father’s imprisonment during the Soviet-Afghan war, the family’s flight to Moscow, his sisters being sealed inside a shipping container bound for Sweden, and the six months the survivors spent detained by Estonian border guards after their smuggling boat was found adrift in the Baltic. Editor Janus Billeskov Jansen cuts between a rougher, sketchier line for the reconstructed past and a calmer palette for the Danish present, while Uno Helmerson’s score stays spare enough that Amin’s own halting delivery, recorded under the alias the film gives him, carries the interviews unaided.
The details that carry it
The details that stay with you are procedural rather than emotional set-pieces: the exact six months in Estonian custody, the fee difference between cheap smugglers and reliable ones, the scripted lie that Amin had to repeat to Danish immigration for years — that he arrived alone, an orphan, with no family left alive — because admitting otherwise risked deportation. The animation is plainest exactly where the story is most extreme, which keeps the film from tipping into spectacle. A visit to a Stockholm gay club with his brother Abbas, where Amin learns his family already knew and never said anything, lands harder for arriving without warning inside an otherwise grim chronology. The Sundance jury’s read on the film as a landmark in documentary form is borne out less by its visual style than by how much specific history it holds without ever restaging a single frame as live action.
Where the present thread thins
The present-day thread is thinner than the historical one; Kasper barely exists beyond his impatience and his relief, and the film has little interest in what it is actually like to build a life with someone whose past you’re only now hearing. The archival news footage, drawn from the Soviet-Afghan war and the chaos in Kabul after the mujahideen advance, sometimes sits oddly against the hand-drawn scenes around it, a reminder that two different registers of true are being spliced together. And the closing summary — that Amin’s mother and brother eventually got out of Russia while his father’s fate stays unknown — arrives as text on screen, a flat ending for a film that has otherwise found inventive ways to withhold and release information.
A lie kept alive past its use
Flee’s real subject is the specific mechanics of a lie kept alive for survival: Amin was coached as a child to claim he had no living family, and he kept performing that story to Danish authorities for years after it stopped being necessary, because the habit of hiding had become indistinguishable from the fact of being safe. Layered onto that is a second, quieter concealment — his sexuality — which he reveals to his brother Abbas only in adulthood and to Kasper only gradually, so the film treats displacement and being closeted as parallel disciplines of self-erasure rather than separate subjects. It is also, structurally, an argument about what animation can do that a camera cannot: draw a person’s memory without asking them to perform it for a lens.
Who this history is for
This suits anyone curious about refugee testimony as a specific, documented history rather than an issue in the abstract, and anyone interested in what animated documentary can do once the label stops sounding like a contradiction. It also rewards viewers willing to sit with a film that resists easy uplift even at the end: the reunion with distant family is announced in a caption, not staged as catharsis. It is a poor choice for children, despite the drawn images, given the subject matter of imprisonment, trafficking and forced deportation, and it will frustrate anyone wanting a conventional talking-heads documentary with maps and timelines, since Rasmussen deliberately withholds context until Amin is ready to give it, which means the geography and chronology take real concentration to track.
Eighty-three minutes, hard to match
Yes. Flee is short at eighty-three minutes, and it earns its unusual distinction — the only film ever nominated for the Oscars’ documentary, animated feature and international feature categories in the same year — by using each form for exactly what it is good at: animation to protect a living person while still showing his face, archive footage to root the story in verifiable history, and an interview structure to let a decades-old silence finally end. Critics were nearly unanimous, and the many top-ten lists it appeared on back that up, but the reason to watch is narrower and more useful than any aggregate score: this is one specific man’s account of one specific decade, told with more precision than most refugee stories are given room for.