Flee combines a harrowing refugee story with child-like wonder

Part-documentary, part-dramatised memoir, Flee is not quite like any other animated film, with the possible exceptions of Waltz with Bashir and Persepolis, two other features about trauma, memory and turbulent history set in the Middle East. Using an economical form of animation that blends densely detailed backgrounds with simplified, cartoony figures and flecked with bits of live-action archive material, Flee tells a remarkable story of displacement and survival that justifies its eclectic, genre-blending approach. This intersects with a coming-out story that is specific to its protagonist.

It starts with the animated figures of the film’s director Jonas Poher Rasmussen and its narrator Amin (not his real name) remembering how they first met as teenagers. Back then, when pressed, Amin would explain that his family had all been killed in Afghanistan and that he’d arrived in Denmark alone. In fact, most of his family had survived, but this more tragic version of events was a fiction needed to help him gain refugee status.

As he lies on a carpet in Rasmussen’s home studio, like a patient visiting a psychoanalyst, he unrolls his story, from his mostly happy childhood in Kabul (memories soundtracked by A-Ha’s “Take On Me”) to the family’s dispersal to a squalid flat in Moscow, a leaky boat off the coast of Estonia, a gay bar in Sweden and finally Copenhagen. There he eventually finds love with a fiancé, Kasper, a thriving academic career and a house by the sea, complete with a joyously unkempt garden and a slinky orange cat. 

In some ways, the use of animation adds a sense of child-like wonder, as if this were an adventure in the tradition of Disney. Except here there are secret police who take fathers away to be tortured, dead-eyed human traffickers, and brutal Russian cops who let Amin and another boy go when they realise the kids have no money to extort but keep an immigrant girl to rape in lieu of payment. It’s an incident Amin will never forget, a stab wound of survivor’s guilt and shame that never heals, a memory one can flee from but never escape.

★★★★☆

In cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from February 11