This film is catching fire, now with several Oscar nominations and has expanded to more cities. I recommend checking for tickets/cities/info at FLEE Official Website
The only reason it didn’t make my Top Ten 2021 list is simply because the competition was fierce. Anyone who thought a pandemic year was going to hurt the quality of releases was mistaken.
Here’s what I said about it in a capsule review:
FLEE
“The one most likely to reap even more awards nominations, this is a documentary that plays like a fictional feature film and…it’s mostly animated! You’ve seen migration stories before – they are harrowing, tense and often uplifting. They are also adventure in its purest form. FLEE is the 15 year culmination of Danish director Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s efforts to tell the story of his decades long friend, Amin Nawabi.
Courtesy: NEON
They met as teenagers in Denmark. Nawabi (and this is what the film is really about) had come from Afghanistan, arriving by himself. No family and he didn’t want to talk about his past, or how he got there.
Eventually, Nawabi lay down, like a psychiatric patient on a couch, and haltingly began to tell how he was a refugee after his country fell in 1989, and his father was taken away. The traumas he endured were many and varied, and the film takes us on his circuitous journey, flashing back but also back to the present for context and for us to learn the secret that Nawabi kept hidden.
It was the animation that made the movie possible- it gave Nawabi the anonymity he needed to tell his story. Rasmussen has done right by his longtime friend. He tells the story with empathy and humanity and heart.”
I am glad the film is expanding-that is never bad news in the industry. I hope you’ll see it and enjoy.
