We are so happy that ‘Flee’ by Jonas Poher Rasmussen obtained an impressive second place at the LUX Audience Award at the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week!
The European Parliament wrote the following about the film:
One of this film’s many great flourishes comes in the opening minutes, as Amin (all the main characters have pseudonyms to protect their anonymity) lies down on a plush couch and prepares to narrate his impressive tale to Rasmussen. Then, just as we in the audience are similarly settling down, a film clapperboard hovers in the corner of the frame, the two main characters giggle and then the scene. And this is all rendered in hand-drawn animation, with the slanted lines and imperfections of a sketch. What reality are we in here? Subjective reality and the nature of our perceptions are in fact one of this film’s key concerns.
The masterstroke of using animation to literally illustrate Amin’s story is that its colourful splendour and spatial exaggerations bring us closer to the feeling of actually ‘accessing’ memory, a bit like the colour-coded levels of reality in Christopher Nolan’s work.
Unlike many migrant narratives in contemporary film, Flee takes place at an earlier point in time – the latter stages of the Afghan-Soviet War in the late 1980s – where escaping had become civilians’ only option. The affinity with the modern refugee crisis is nonetheless obvious. In his early teens, Amin initially decamped from Afghanistan, along with his frail mother and three older siblings, to Russia, the only country that would take them. Yet this was merely a temporary solution, with their Russian visas expiring and the country descending into turmoil after the fall of communism. The bulk of the film follows Amin’s increasingly hapless and Kafkaesque attempts to settle in a more secure Western European country. Yet a person is not solely defined by their political status, and a key thread in this story is Amin’s burgeoning queer sexuality; we see his struggles to conceal this from his family, and how he explores his urges in private and with people of his own age.