Flee - Review Thread

Flee(1/25/2022)
In 2008 we got the first “animated documentary” in the form of the Israeli film Waltz With Bashir, which was a great movie but was not by my definition (at the time anyway) really a documentary. To me a documentary is defined by being built of authentic footage and with few exceptions that movie didn’t really have any kind of real documentary footage, it was a constructed animated film that just so happened to have the real subject narrating it. Twenty three years later we’ve gotten a new “animated documentary” also nominally about conflict in the middle east, and I think I’m a little more comfortable with calling this one a doc. The film is mostly told via a set of interviews with a man named Amin Nawabi, a naturalized Dane who was born in Afghanistan and had to flee with his family after the Taliban took over that country from the Soviets in the early 90s and much of the film is about him recounting the various ordeals they needed to go through in order to get into Western Europe. The film is rendered predominantly through traditional 2D animation, which is used to reenact all of Nawabi’s stories about his emigration attempts that obviously weren’t filmed but the film also continues using the animation when it cuts to his “talking head” interviews and other bits depicting his life within the present. The film does use some live action stock footage from time to time however, and in some ways that gives it a bit of a clearer connection to that documentary format and given that the interview segments were presumably “filmed” but then animated just to make everything a little more uniform I don’t think I’ll be questioning the documentary designation.

In many ways the animated Middle East set this more closely resembles than Waltz With Bashir is the film Persepolis, about a girl whose family leaves Iran after that country’s revolution. Both films look at the European immigrant experience of fairly young people around the same point in history and both have their occasional points of levity centered around the character listening to cheesy 80s music. This one though is more specifically about the challenges of refugees and is clearly trying to build empathy for those escaping from dangerous places, possibly in hopes of making its audience more accepting of modern refugees from places like Syria. As such this is not exactly the most complex case study in the refugee experience: Nawabi has basically been handpicked for this project because he’s something of a best case scenario, someone who fled from certain death at great hardship as a child to one day become a highly productive member of society in his host country. Still, the film is good at eliciting interesting little details of his escape that you might not expect like the major role that corrupt Russian cops played in this guy’s life or the perils of wearing light-up sneakers when attempting to flee a country. In broad strokes I can’t say there was much in the movie that truly surprised me but it certainly tells its story with style and definitely kept me pretty interested throughout.
***1/2 out of Five

Not sure about Foreign Film (one would think it'd be either Drive My Car or Worst Person in the World), but seems like a shoe-in to win Best Documentary and then at a more cautious second Animated Feature if people want to move away from the usual suspects in that category (namely Disney/Pixar movies). It's happened before.

It'll walk away with at least one Oscar.