Flee: A Personal Look at Life as a Refugee

A person who saw a trailer for Flee before seeing the movie may not have realized that it is a documentary. Unlike most documentaries, Flee is almost entirely animated. This serves the film in such a way as to allow emotional moments to land more effectively and create one of the most visually innovative documentaries in the modern era.

The film follows the story of Amin, an Afghani refugee who is forced to leave his homeland and attempt to find safety and freedom from political persecution in the 1980s. This was one of the first interesting things to happen in this movie considering that Cold War proxy wars are not shown to have a human cost among civilians who live in the area. It is one of those things where, because of media portrayal of a morally black and white conflict, the collateral damage is not considered. This documentary does not shy away from showing that aspect of it and portraying why those events can lead to the rise of religious extremism both among people and as a form of government.

The use of animation as the medium is important as well because the events being portrayed do not have firsthand video footage. There is some b-roll footage from news reports and other documentaries peppered throughout, however the main thrust of the narrative is told through animation to illustrate events as Amin remembers them. Animation also helps portray the events where the memory is cloudy by taking the normally vibrant colors and replacing them with grayscale amorphous but vaguely human shapes to illustrate confusion. There are sequences that portray people in constrained environments such as the interior of a boat or in a shipping container and the animation allows for a greater feeling of claustrophobia for these sequences.

The decision to keep the animation going for everything except for stock footage and b-roll is incredibly helpful because it prevents a differentiation from reality and a warped version of reality. By animating even the modern aspects of Amin’s life and the conversations that he has with the director, it prevents the audience from splitting off and dismissing the past experience.

This movie is worth watching because, even though it is a fairly recent refugee story, what happens to Amin is translatable to refugees going far beyond this story and this event. It is a humanizing view at events that are frequently dehumanized in the media. It is easy to understand how this movie made the Academy Awards short list for both Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature.

Final Rating: 9.5/10