Director

Jonas Poher Rasmussen

Denmark, France, Sweden, Norway | 2021 | 90 min | Danish, Dari, English, French, Russian

• Producer Monica Hellström, Signe Byrge Sørensen, Jean-François Le Corre, Mathieu Courtois, Charlotte Most, Maria Ekerhovd
• Production Company Final Cut for Real, Vivement Lundi!, MostFilm, Mer Film
• Screenplay Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Amin
• Cinematography
• Editing Janus Billeskov Jansen
• Sound Edward Björner, Tormod Ringers
• Cast
• Contacts

  Cinephil
  

  philippa@Cinephil.com, Olivier@Cinephil.com

About the Film

Flee, 2021 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winner, is a thrilling survival story and a powerful and poetic memoir of personal struggle and self-discovery that expands the definition of documentary. Amin Nawabi (pseudonym), a 36-year-old high-achieving academic, grapples with a painful secret he has kept hidden for 20 years, one that threatens to derail the life he has built for himself and his soon-to-be husband. Using animation to protect the protagonist’s identity, Nawabi recounts his story to director Jonas Poher Rasmussen — his close friend and high-school classmate, revealing for the first time the details of his extraordinary journey as a child refugee from Afghanistan to safety in Denmark.

The result is a film not confined by documentary constraints, bringing audiences into direct contact with the terrifying experiences of a teen refugee through an astonishing array of archival footage, ’80s pop music, and hand-drawn animations.

Through heartfelt interviews between Jonas and Amin, Flee shows how only by confronting the past is it possible to carve out a future, and how one finds the true meaning of home only after one stops fleeing from oneself. Although the interviews function almost like therapy, nothing about them is didactic, clinical, or overly analytical. Instead, there is a kind of spontaneous purity to the storytelling, built on the empathetic connection established between the filmmaker and his subject.

Riz Ahmed and Game of Thrones‘ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau serve as executive producers. “I was floored by the emotional impact of Flee,” Ahmed said in a statement. “This is a unique project that pushes forward our ideas of what documentary, animation, and refugee-centered narratives can be.” Flee represents both a homecoming and a coming out.

Nicole Guillemet