Flee

Winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance, this stylistically bold film tells the story of an Afghan refugee’s coming home – and coming out – via animation and archival footage.

An extraordinary tale of one man’s journey and the secret that threatens to unravel him, Flee retells the life of the pseudonymous Amin, a child refugee who escaped the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan to travel via Russia to Denmark, where he now resides. Framed as a conversation between Amin and Danish director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, who have known each other since they were teens, the film makes innovative use of traditional and rotoscoped animation – recalling Waltz with Bashir (MIFF 2008) – to both obscure and reveal its subject, mixing recreated, sometimes hazy memory with archival television news footage from the 1980s and 90s.

Executive-produced by Riz Ahmed and originally selected for Cannes 2020, Rasmussen’s documentary is a provocative piece of memoir, moving from Amid’s childhood – sprinkled with a-ha, Roxette and a formative crush on Jean-Claude Van Damme – to his harrowing flight from the Afghan Civil War. Along the way, Amin must learn to negotiate a world hostile to his sexuality and build a new life with his Danish partner, Kasper.

“A powerful and poetic memoir of personal struggle and self-discovery that expands the definition of documentary.” – Hollywood Reporter