[FILM]
FLEE
The refugees en route to, hopefully, a new beginning.
★★★★★
OUT 11 FEBRUARY CERT TBC / 90 MINS
DIRECTOR Jonas Poher Rasmussen CAST (VOICES) Daniel Karimyar, Fardin Mijdzadeh, Milad Eskandari, Belal Faiz
PLOT After years of keeping it private, gay Afghan Amin (Daniel Karimyar, Fardin Mijdzadeh), living in Denmark, shares his story of migration, an exodus from repressive Kabul through Russia and Estonia.
REFUGEE STORIES HAVE a tragic, crushing universality about them: dank cargo-holds and shipping containers, thuggish human traffickers, the desperation of families torn apart by war and persecution. But in the telling of one such story — that of Amin Nawabi (Daniel Karimyar, Fardin Mijdzadeh), an Afghan academic settled in Denmark but still shaken by the escape he made during his teenage years — documentary filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen has somehow found a way inside these horrors that’s truly unique. Flee jolts to life via swirling hand-drawn animation, which is not what you’d expect. It’s also a memory play, a therapy session and, most subtly, a coming-out comedy. Unspooling like a hush of secrets about to be disclosed after decades, Flee is a stirring, haunted reminiscence like no other.