As we settled down to watch Flee, we realised that we had seen it before. It was in Sundance last year, I believe, alongside Censor, which permitted us to watch it on their platform. However, within a few minutes of that strange sensation when you re-acquaint yourself with images that you’ve forgotten you’ve already seen, the film took over and it felt like the first time all over again. Flee is a film about a refugee, but it approaches the subject matter using animated recreations of filmed scenes, something the final image makes clear. The effect is enormously powerful. There are limits to the possibilities of naturalistic representation. There comes a point when the presence of an actor representing a supposedly real event interferes with the audience’s reception of that event. The scene doesn’t feel quite “true”. Rasmussen’s use of animation as he tells the story of Amin’s flight from Kabul to Moscow and eventually Copenhagen, erases this doubt. Using animation allows the viewer to avoid the question of literal, documentary truth and engage with the story on another register. The use of interspersed archive footage, from Afghanistan and Russia (something I don’t recall from the Sundance cut - was it added later?) helps to root us in the reality of these places, but we identify with Amin all the more because his story is not framed by an actor playing him. It’s a highly subtle form of storytelling which has the effect of making Amin’s experiences feel achingly real.
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