For those playing the Oscars game at home, the Danish animated docudrama Flee is this year's history-making triple threat. It's the first time a film has been simultaneously nominated in the Best Documentary, Best Animation, and Best International Feature categories – and it's not hard to see why.
Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen's film, the true story of a gay Afghan man's flight from war-torn Kabul to his eventual refuge in Copenhagen, is a carefully calibrated, compassionate work that's moving and deeply personal. It resonates as an exploration of displacement and cultural identity, and as an indictment of global neglect, as lives are torn asunder by power struggles between meddling superpowers and ideological regimes.
Not incidentally, it's also something of a tribute to the lifesaving pleasures of pop culture: the dreamy allure of a Bollywood trading card; the sexual awakening prompted by a beefcake action movie star; the simple pleasure of listening to Swedish superstars Roxette.
Executive produced by actors Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Flee is the story of the pseudonymous Amin, a now-40-something man who, as a child in the 80s, escaped Afghanistan before finding refuge in Denmark many years later.
Rasmussen has known the real-life Amin since they were both teenagers in Copenhagen, and he frames the film as an intimate, extended interview with his old friend, whose tale is brought to life through tactile, hand-drawn animation.
The animation creates a necessary shroud of anonymity – the real-life Amin was understandably reluctant to become a subject of public discussion – but also taps into the abstraction of memory, alternating between a lucid, graphic-novel style for events in the present, and more impressionistic, sketchy renderings for episodes in the past.
In present-day Copenhagen, Amin, laid out like he's in hypnotherapy, flashes back to early memories of childhood on the streets of Kabul. It's 1984, and he's barely four, wearing his older sister's dress as he runs wild to the sound of A-ha's Take on Me, a song whose famously hand-drawn music video cues the film's sequence of animated whimsy. (It might seem pedantic to quibble that the version of the Norwegian mega-hit used here was actually released in 1985, but for a true story invoking one of that decade's signature songs, you'd think a little more attention to detail might have been applied.)
He's the youngest child in a family, with two sisters and two brothers – one who's fled to Stockholm, the other under pressure to join the Afghan army – whose parents are caught in the crossfire of a civil war that's tearing the nation's capital apart.
With the US-armed rebels and Soviet-backed government at war, and dad seemingly kidnapped by those in power, Amin's family have little choice but to escape their home. What follows is a turbulent journey across several years and countries, as mother and children take flight to a desolate, post-communist Moscow, and leave themselves in the hands of human traffickers in order to reach Scandinavia.
Sometimes splicing archival news footage into its animated sequences, Flee flits back and forth across past and present, scrambling Amin's troubled memories with his seemingly tranquil present-day life, where he and his Danish partner, Kasper, contemplate marriage and buying a storybook country house.
This apparently idyllic present sits in contrast to the stateless slipstream of Amin's youth, raising questions about the idea of home – suggesting it's a reality that's taken for granted by so many – and the potential effects of childhood trauma on adult relationships.
"Most people can't even begin to imagine how fleeing like that affects you, what it means for your relationships with other people," Amin says.
In one affecting scene, the young Amin watches his homeland recede through the window of an airplane that's taking his family elsewhere; forced to leave a country that he'll never – thanks to circumstances beyond his control – have the chance to know.
Rasmussen and his team of animators craft some of the film's most striking visuals for its passages of escape, using an abstract, shadowy style to depict episodes such as a refugee caravan marching through a terrifying Russian forest, or the squalid conditions inside a shipping container packed with hungry, hopeless humans en route to supposed safer climes.
These events also work to interrogate the West's perception of the refugee experience. In a pivotal scene, Amin makes it past Danish border control by feeding them a fake story that he's been trained to recite – one in which his entire family has been wiped out – because that's what it takes to move the guard to feeling compassion.
Meanwhile, Amin's sexuality is its own parallel tale of cultural displacement.
"In Afghanistan, homosexuals didn't exist," Amin explains, reckoning with memories of a country where being gay was both illegal and seen as bringing shame to a family. "There wasn't even a word for them."
But Flee locates many of its lighter, more joyful moments in Amin's sexual awakening, like the image of Bollywood icon Anil Kapoor offering the young boy a knowing wink from a trading card, or Belgian brawler Jean-Claude Van Damme shooting a seductive glance from a television screen. (Van Damme's Bloodsport is one of several macho action movie posters adorning Amin's childhood bedroom wall.)
Later, a teenage Amin shares a pair of headphones, and a tender moment, with a cute older boy as they listen to Roxette's buoyant hit, Joyride – a song that glorifies the giddy pleasures of escape, in ironic counterpoint to Amin's dislocated journey. (Between the emotional, life-affirming relief offered by the super Swedes, and Norwegian hitmakers A-ha, the film is almost shameless Scandinavian pop propaganda.)
Flee's animation style often feels better suited to these lighter moments of memory; elsewhere, the graphics can risk putting a too-comfortable distance between the audience and the very real turmoil of Amin's life.
For some audiences, at least, the film's animation may work to undermine the innate power of Amin's words, which are complex and moving with or without visual accompaniment.
Those questions aside, Flee is a considered attempt to do justice to Amin's story, and to retain the integrity of his memories.
Rasumussen's vision is humane and hopeful, even as it acknowledges the challenges of reckoning with the past – and admits that, just maybe, some damage can never really be repaired.
Flee is in cinemas now.
