Don’t miss this week’s theatrical release of The Escape. An animated documentary that tells the moving odyssey of a young Afghan refugee. A great work that has been cited three times at the Oscars 2022 and is covered in prizes around the world.
For the first time, 36-year-old Amin, a young gay Afghan refugee, agrees to tell his story. Lying with his eyes closed on a table covered with an oriental cloth, he delves into his past, torn between the radiant innocence of his childhood in Kabul in the 1980s and the trauma of his family fleeing the civil war before seizing power. by the Taliban.
After years of hiding in Russia, Amin – a pseudonym – arrives alone in Denmark aged 16, where he meets a director who becomes his friend. Throughout his story and buried pain, emotions resurface. Today, a brilliant university student with his Danish companion Kasper, a young man confides a secret he has been hiding for twenty years…
A shocking confession
“What does the word “home” mean to you? – “Home? Let’s see… a place where I feel safe. A place where I can stay and not have to leave. This is not a temporary thing. “ It is with these deeply poignant and intimately resonant words that Flee, a moving animated documentary, opens in theaters on August 31, three months after it aired on Arte.
Broadcast by the Franco-German channel to celebrate its 30th anniversary, this European co-production made Oscar history: it was actually cited three times for titles in the 2022 edition. Best Documentary, Best Animated Feature and Best Foreign Language Feature.
Featuring the French voices of Kian Khojandi and Damien Bonnard, Flee has won awards around the world (almost 80!), including the 2021 Crystal at Annecy for Feature Films, the Grand Prize for World Documentary at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Or the European Film Prize for Best Documentary and Animation 2021, just a handful.
We tend, for convenience, to trace the birth of the animated documentary to Ari Folman’s excellent Valse avec Bachir, which caused a sensation when it was released in 2008. However, the history of this genre can be traced almost back. before the birth of cinema itself. Nevertheless, the very wide range of animated cinema offers a special tool for combining document encounters and re-images.
Animation that exactly serves the purpose of the escape magnificently, signed by the Danish director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, who supports here the pose of both interviewer and accomplice. Although the film tells the saga of a colorful Afghan asylum seeker, the most traumatic events are narrated in black-and-white sequences shot with charcoal, ghostly shadows.
TV news archives also mention the story, including In 1994, the terrible sinking of an Estonian ferry that killed 852 people : In reality, these invasions find a strong resonance, and the tragedies of refugees are repeated, which is illustrated today by the war in Ukraine.
“Fifteen years ago, when I was making radio documentaries, I was asked to testify. But at the time, he didn’t feel ready. He told me that the day he made a decision, he would share it with me. his story” says Jonas Poher Rasmussen.
“A workshop in Denmark combining documentary filmmaking and animation gave us the appropriate form for this project. In addition to emotionally reviving past events, animation guaranteed Amin’s anonymity, shielding him from the public eye and allowing people to freely talk about themselves and live without reliving their traumas.
But tracing his memory turned out to be a slow process: it took time for certain episodes to sink in and tell them. The result, between painful introspection and the catharsis of survival, is remarkable.
Source: allocine
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