Animation, here, isn't a stylistic affectation; it's an epistemological urgency. An act of protection, certainly, but above all a declaration of intent. With Flee, Jonas Poher Rasmussen doesn't merely document a story; he evokes it. He coaxes it out from the mists of traumatic memory, giving it a form that live-action photography could never capture. We are faced with a work that weaves itself into the tradition of animated documentary, a noble subgenre inaugurated by masterpieces like Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir, but which shifts its axis from the collective to the intimate, from the war report to the psychoanalytic session. If Folman used drawing to reconstruct the black holes of a national repression, Rasmussen employs it to give a face—and, at the same time, anonymity—to a single, fragmented consciousness.

The film opens on a couch. Not literally, but the posture of Amin Nawabi (a pseudonym, the first of many protective layers) is that of the confessor, of the patient who finally allows himself the luxury—or the agony—of telling his story. Lying down, eyes closed, he recalls. The director, his long-time friend, is the maieutic therapist who asks the right questions, the ones that unhinge decades of silence. The film's structure is this conversation, a stream of consciousness that unravels between a comfortable, bourgeois Danish present and an Afghan, Russian, and Baltic past made of escapes, losses, and forced metamorphoses. The present is drawn with a clear line, almost like a European bande dessinée, clean and reassuring. The past, however, is an explosion of styles. The drawing becomes more expressionistic, the colors saturating or fading depending on the scene's emotional charge, and in moments of the most acute trauma, the line dissolves, transforming into abstract and terrifying charcoal sketches, like etchings by a Goya who had witnessed the horror of human trafficking.

This visual dialectic between memory and its verbalization is the beating heart of Flee. The film does not blindly trust its protagonist's memory; on the contrary, it reveals its full fallibility, its reconstructive nature. As in a W.G. Sebald novel, where the text dialogues with grainy photographs to question the weight of history on the individual, Rasmussen intersperses the animation with rare, powerful inserts of archival footage. We see the streets of Kabul before the Taliban, the news reports of the era speaking of Gorbachev and the Mujahideen. These fragments of the real don't serve to "validate" Amin's story, but to create a short circuit. They stage the unbridgeable gap between History with a capital H—the impersonal story of the news, of grand events—and the small-h, subjective, and harrowing story of those who suffered those events on their own skin. Animation thus becomes the space of the unspeakable, the language for that which a camera lens cannot record: the fear, the hunger, the desperation of a child hidden in a shipping container.

Amin's journey is an Odyssey in reverse. If Odysseus fought to return home, Amin fights to escape a home that no longer exists and to find a new one—a concept, an emotional place before it is a geographical one. The word "home" becomes the central topos, an obsession that haunts him. What is "home" for someone who has had to change their name, their nationality, even their family history to survive? It's a question that resonates with an almost metaphysical urgency. In this, Amin is a reluctant hero, an almost film noir figure. A man with a secret past, living in constant terror that the truth might emerge and destroy the fragile normality he has built for himself. His relationship with his partner, Kasper, who wants to buy a house with him, becomes the catalyst for the crisis. The act of putting down roots, for someone who has been violently uprooted, is not a desire but a threat. Buying a house becomes the objective correlative of his inability to accept a future, because it would mean reckoning, once and for all, with his past.

But Flee is not just the chronicle of a geopolitical flight. It is also, and perhaps above all, the story of a multiple and stratified coming out. Amin must not only reveal his past as a refugee; he must also make peace with his homosexuality, experienced in cultural contexts—'80s Afghanistan, post-Soviet Russia—where it was a taboo or a crime. The discovery of his sexual identity is inextricably intertwined with the loss of his national one. His first erotic stirrings, associated with images of Western action movie stars on his bedroom walls in Kabul, represent another form of "escape," a desire for an elsewhere that is both geographical and existential. Rasmussen handles this dual narrative with a sublime delicacy, showing how the different forms of oppression and secrecy feed off one another, creating an inner prison from which it is incredibly difficult to escape.

There is a literary analogy that forcefully imposes itself: that of Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights. But if the mythical storyteller told tales each night to save her life, Amin saved his life precisely by not telling his. His silence was his armor, the lie a visa to salvation. The film documents the moment this armor becomes a cage. The act of telling his story is, for him, no longer a death sentence but the only path to liberation, to finally being able to "inhabit" his own life. It is a Proustian process, in which the taste of a madeleine is replaced by the sound of his director-friend's voice, a trigger that brings time lost surging back not with nostalgia, but with the searing weight of trauma.

Flee is a work of rare formal and emotional intelligence. It transcends the category of "refugee film" to become a universal reflection on the unstable nature of identity, on the healing and destructive power of memory, and on the human need to tell stories to make sense of the chaos of existence. It is a psychological thriller disguised as a documentary, an epic poem reduced to the scale of a single room, a political act that rejects rhetoric to embrace the specificity of a single, unrepeatable human experience. In the end, the flight of the title is not just from Afghanistan, from Russia, from the traffickers. It is the flight from oneself, from the secrets that chain us. And the true home, the film seems to suggest in its moving and cathartic finale, is not a physical place to be bought with a mortgage, but that space of trust and truth that is built, word by word, in listening to another. A masterpiece that doesn't just show, but teaches a new way of seeing. And of listening.