There’s little precedent for Danish documentary filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, the tale of Afghan refugee Amin Nawadi, because documentaries aren’t typically thought of in terms of animation. What springs to mind immediately is Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir; and the filmography of Keith Maitland, who typically either incorporates animation into his films (as in The Eyes of Me, Dear Mr. Brody) or animates them from start to finish (as in Tower, his masterpiece). That’s about all. It is otherwise exceedingly rare for documentaries to reject live action verisimilitude in favor of animation’s artifice.
But Flee couldn’t have been made any other way. The film spotlights Amin, who escaped from Kabul with his family in the 1990s at the onset of the Taliban’s rise to dominance during the Afghan Civil War; Russian forces had vacated the land in 1989, leaving the Republic of Afghanistan and the Mujahideen to clash in the resultant power vacuum. To make Flee using the traditional format of talking heads and archival footage, or to shoot it as a dramatized biopic, would have robbed the film of its resonance — and Amin of the right to recount his own story. Authorship matters.
