Flee

No one else knows all the details of his escape, not even his partner. The film’s director Jonas Poher Rasmussen nonetheless manages to get his school friend Amin to open up about his journey from 1980s Afghanistan to Denmark of today—with the promise that he will remain completely anonymous.

Rasmussen maintains Amin’s anonymity mainly by animating his story, which is at times thrilling and at times emotionally moving. In hand-drawn 2D animations, the director outlines Amin’s long journey through the no-man’s-land between citizen and “illegal,” encountering corrupt Russian police and ruthless people smugglers in a life marked by tedium alternating with life-threatening tension.

But even more, Flee is a film about how a person's mind is affected by such conditions, about how you can’t stop hiding your true self even when you do have all the right documents. As a gay man working in the business world, Amin had no alternative but to construct a false identity—one that now, at last, safely concealed by the animations, he is gradually gathering the courage to discard.