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'Flee' sketches human face of Afghan refugee crisis
Jonas Poher Rasmussen's hybrid documentary, an award-winning film about a gay Afghan refugee, is Denmark's official candidate for next year's Oscars.
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Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen and Eugene Hernandez attend The 59th New York Film Festival Opening Night - Flee at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on September 28, 2021 in New York City. (AFP/Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)
F
em>Flee, an award-winning film about a gay Afghan refugee undertaking the perilous journey to Europe, puts a real-life human face on the country's decades-long crisis while simultaneously keeping its subject anonymous -- through animation.
Jonas Poher Rasmussen's hybrid documentary, which won the Sundance festival's jury prize and is Denmark's official candidate for next year's Oscars, stems from his teenage friendship with "Amin."
"I had the curiosity about his past ever since I met him when we were 15 years old, and he arrived to my Danish hometown," said Rasmussen, now 40.
While Amin was initially not interested in telling his story for film -- fearing risking his asylum status and being seen as a victim -- the idea to animate their interviews came to Rasmussen, a radio documentary-maker, in 2013.
"This way he can share his story, and still meet people on a clean slate -- people wouldn't know his innermost secrets, know his traumas."
The telling of those traumas are abundant in Flee, from the disappearance of Amin's father in a 1980s Kabul under communism, to his family's desperate decision to abandon the Afghan capital as the Taliban encircled the city in 1996.
Archive newsreel footage used within the film evokes obvious parallels with the Taliban's seizure of power again in Afghanistan this summer.
