Sundance 2021: Flee is a boundary-breaking documentary about survival

It’s difficult to predict the kind of films that will shine from year-to-year at Sundance, if this year’s festival left us with one overarching impression, it’s that 2021 is an excellent year for documentaries.

From Edgar Wright’s quirky chronicle The Sparks Brothers to the HBO-produced Sesame Street documentary Street Gang, the category was filled to the brim with fascinating dives into all sorts of subjects. But if we had to pick one documentary that rose above the rest, it wasn’t a major studio contender or even the story of a beloved pop culture symbol. Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, a harrowing chronicle of a refugee’s journey to start a new life, bends the boundaries of documentary to craft a gripping story brimming with tension and haunting us long after the film ends.

Executive produced by Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Flee tells the incredible story of Amin, an Afghan refugee living a quiet, peaceful life in Denmark. For the entirety of his adult life, Amin has hidden his past from everyone he knows – including his husband-to-be Kasper, and Rasmussen, the director and a close friend of Amin’s. But Amin finally decides to come clean with the truth about his past – a brutal globetrotting journey that took him from Afghanistan to Russia to a handful of European nations in an attempt to flee from political persecution.

Amin’s father was a target during an Afghanistan military coup, as he, his brother, his two sisters, and his mother were forced to flee to Russia –  one of the only countries where they could seek asylum as refugees. From there, he and his family made several failed attempts to seek shelter in Western Europe – everything from stowing away on boats, to making the journey on foot, to hiding in cargo holds.

The journey is brutal, filled with terror, corruption, and disturbing imagery – and as Amin is slowly separated one-by-one from his family members, he attempts to keep his nerve together and make it to Denmark safely, all while navigating coming to terms with his own sense of self and his sexuality.

What sets Flee apart from most documentaries is that it’s entirely animated – a move by Rasmusseen to protect Amin’s identity – in fact, Amin isn’t even his real name. Though the animation serves a practical purpose in keeping its subject safe, it also serves an artistic one – the gorgeous, hand-drawn renderings are incredibly striking in their relative simplicity, somehow managing to capture the terror and uncertainty that plagued Amin on his journey in simple two-dimensional strokes.

The colorful, simplistic tableaus also pose a striking contrast to when the film makes use of archival footage – but despite the animated setting, Flee somehow never lose the constant, overwhelming sense of dread and fear that Amin must be feeling. Though the archived footage in the film is disturbing and violent, Flee‘s most haunting moments are ones captured in 2D – a group of smugglers debating whether or not to murder an old woman for slowing their escape down, and a handful of corrupt Russian police officers raping an unsuspecting young woman are made no less stomach-churning when they’re drawn out.

Even more moving than the horrors that Amin encountered, though, is the fact that he managed to make it through it all and build a new life for himself. Eventually, he does make it to Denmark via a false passport, where he goes on to meet his fiancee and Rasmussen. But even then, after everything he’s been through, Amin still can’t open up to anyone – and that idea is even more terrifying than what he saw during his escape.

The idea of having to hide your entire past from your loved ones – for fear of death – is such a striking concept that it seems like something you’d read in a New York Times bestseller or see in a Tom Hanks drama – not something that happens in real life. But Amin’s incredible story is true – and not only did he manage to endure all that hardship and conceal his identity – he did so while also finding his sense of self as a queer man growing up in a middle eastern nation.

Though much of Flee‘s runtime is devoted to building tension, chronicling the most harrowing aspects of Amin’s journey, and exploring the relationship between Amin and the director as he tells his story for the first time, we also get to learn about Amin’s journey of self-discovery, and how he came into his sexuality as a little boy growing up and watching Jean Claude Van Damme movies at home in Afghanistan.

The inclusion of Amin’s sexual identity, his coming out, and his eventual engagement in the present is the perfect tonic to the horrors of his journey to safety – and paints Flee with a glimmer of hope that left us feeling uplifted, not scarred, by Amin’s story. With dazzling animation, near-perfect pacing, and a story so full of twists and turns it almost seems too much to be true, Flee is a boundary-shattering documentary that sets the standard for what the limits of documentary filmmaking can achieve.

Are you planning to give Flee a look? What kind of documentaries do you generally enjoy? Let us know in the comments.