Flee, an animation jewel to catch up on television and streaming
Danish director Jonas Poher Rasmussen signs an amazing animation documentary on a man who has long hidden his true past, from Afghanistan to Denmark for a long time. Large, a big film.
Awarded in Sundance and Annecy, appointed three times to the Oscars, the breathtaking animation documentary Flee, released at the cinema in 2022, is broadcast this Thursday evening on France 4 (then to see streaming on the France Télévisions site). Our criticism:
A testimony, but no images. A few years ago, Danish director Jonas Poher Rasmussen finally succeeded in making his childhood speak, Amin, on his past disorder. On one condition: his anonymity will have to remain total. During these long interviews, only Amin’s voice is recorded. He tells how he invented another life, hiding from those around him that he had fled Afghanistan in the late 1980s when he was just a kid, at the time of the takeover of the mujahideen. At 36, Amin is now a recognized academic in Denmark, as a couple with a man. Crazy trajectory that Rasmussen retraces in the form of an animation documentary: Flee visually fills the holes by alternating between semi-realistic drawings (most of the film), scribbled and drafts (the most vaporous moments in the spirit of Amin, or the worst passages of his existence) and archive images in real shots. A disturbing device, which accentuates the harshness of reality by instilling fiction. The effect is striking and immersive, thunderous marriage of form and bottom.
Introspection
Shoted live, Flee would have certainly worked. But the animation strengthens all the choices of staging: even the sequences “face camera” between the director and Amin – which could easily have come from the exploitation of emotion in another format – take an unexpected evocative force here. In turn heartbreaking survival film and a story of emancipation, Flee evokes both the refugee crisis and the trauma to grow by discovering itself gay in a country that does not tolerate homosexuality. It is above all a great suspense story, never tearful and of great modesty, on the violence of uncertainty and chaos of the world. The story of a man haunted by his past and his forced lies, now alone on the ruins of his memories. The introspection will have rarely been so universal.
