Flee

I had heard so many great things about the documentary Flee so I was really excited to finally be able to see it at the Broadway last night.  It is even better than I anticipated!  Jonas Poher Rasmussen interviews his friend Amin Nawabi about his harrowing escape from the civil war in his home country of Afghanistan, his years in exile in Russia, an ill-fated attempt to escape only to be sent back, and finally claiming asylum alone in Denmark.  Nawabi relates his experiences so that he can make peace with his past, especially the guilt he feels for abandoning his family and the pressure he feels to succeed to compensate for it, in order to have a future with his partner Kasper.  Amin's story is incredibly poignant, particularly the scenes of him and his family trying to leave Russia, but what makes this documentary even more compelling is that it uses animation to tell the story to preserve his anonymity.  I have never seen anything like it before and I was really struck by the different types of animation employed in order to convey different emotions.  When Amin is being interviewed by Rasmussen, he is shown lying on a couch with an overhead shot so that the audience is looking down on him.  To me, this feels like we are looking into his soul as he reveals his deepest secrets for the first time.  The scenes showing his happy childhood in Kubul and his interactions with Kasper in present-day Copenhagen are very bright and colorful whereas the scenes in Moscow are dark and dreary to depict his state of mind.  Many scenes of terror, including the capture of his father and his sisters' escape on a container ship, are shown in black and white with indistinct and chaotic line drawings as if the memories are too painful to remember clearly.  Archival footage of actual events in Afghanistan and Russia is used very effectively to establish the veracity of Amin's account and the haunting score filled with plaintive violin solos does much to enhance the traumatic nature of Amin's memories.  This documentary, which highlights the power of storytelling as a way to heal, is something really special and I highly recommend it.