Flee

Jonas Poher Rasmussen's Flee (Flugt) opened at Sundance 2021 and was nominated for three Academy Awards in 2022 (Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary Feature, and Best International Feature Film) making it the first film ever nominated in all three categories simultaneously. The film won an extensive list of European prizes including the European Film Award for Best Documentary. Rasmussen, a Danish-Romani filmmaker, had been friends with the central subject for over fifteen years before the film began production; the friendship is the documentary's structural foundation.

An Afghan academic now living in Copenhagen (protected by the pseudonym Amin Nawabi throughout the film, with most identifying details abstracted into animated-figure presentation) sits down with the director on the eve of his wedding to his long-term partner and finally tells the story of his flight from Kabul as a teenager in the early 1990s. The story has been kept secret from most of his Danish-life social circle, including his fiancé, for over twenty years. The film moves between contemporary Copenhagen interview footage (rotoscoped into animation) and animated reconstruction of the long migration eastwards through Russia, the Baltics, and finally to Denmark.

The film's structural and ethical commitment to protecting Amin's identity (itself a refugee-protection issue, since aspects of his original asylum claim could expose him to retroactive immigration sanctions) is among the most-discussed methodological choices in documentary filmmaking of its decade. The animation register, mostly hand-drawn 2D, anchors the film's distinctive register.