Flee

Directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen. 2021

I saw Flee at the London Film Festival in October – my partner works in the charity sector with young refugees and an email went round about tickets. I always get anxious about wanting a wee in a film or a show – I’m becoming aware I need everything to be perfect so the idea of holding a piss throughout spoils it, and so does getting up halfway through and missing something – as does being the big, conspicuous oaf tripping over handbags on the way through – drawing scornful thoughts from people all around. And I think I was extra stressed here because with my partner’s colleagues I didn’t want to be embarrassing or come across weird. My method has been to go at the last moment, cutting it as close as possible to the start of the thing, but that comes with worry about holding people up and the danger becomes rushing which compounds everything. So as we took seats in the screening room and director, Jonas Poher Rasmussen, introduced his film, I started to feel incomplete and panic rose up. Hot, tiresome dread. Soon I was staggering around screaming inside my brain, out of touch with the air I was breathing, my hand in hers in her lap, my feet in boots on the carpeted floor. On the screen dark shapes like gathering black clouds. A title reads “This is a true story”. Sketched figures run in a falling city – pained charcoal lines making arms and legs which drive into the earth, pumping themselves forward.

Flee is an animated documentary that works across two timelines. In the present, Amin (not his real name) is a successful young guy living in Copenhagen. He met the documentarian on the train as teenagers and they became close. For a long time in their relationship Rasmussen never knew that Amin had been an unaccompanied asylum seeking minor when he arrived in Denmark, or the specifics of his journey from Afghanistan after mujahideen insurgency in the 80s and 90s. Interviews between the two take us back to that time. Rasmussen is gentle with his friend – patient and warm. Sometimes he questions but often allows their meetings to drift in silence – only leaving space. And Amin, by speaking it all out loud over the course of their conversations, bears careful witness to the terrifying things he endured – the disappearance of his father when Kabul became unsafe, the corruption of police and calloused inhumanity of traffickers, the profound fear of days spent locked in a shipping container at sea, and the shame of being photographed, desperate for rescue in a dingy, by curious holiday makers on a cruise ship. In the here and now Amin is viewing houses outside the city. He is drawn with short dark hair and a faint beard, while his partner Kasper is blonde with hip, circular glasses.

Early on we sit in on dinner preparations in their flat. Kasper looks almost chained to the stove, stirring and seasoning, while Amin remains a little separate. As they talk there’s an awkwardness around planning their future. When are they going to marry? After they buy a house. When will they buy a house? Hard to say – Amin is always remembering urgent commitments that take him abroad months at a time. Kasper jokes he’ll just buy somewhere while Amin is away. He’ll come back and be forced to deal with it. Smiles fade and they go quiet. Someone offers a humourless laugh. Kasper turns to set the table.
Later they visit one of those proposed homes in the country, and in the gardens Kasper strides ahead with the estate agent talking merrily. How special it would be to have a hazelnut tree… or wait… are those even hazelnuts? Amin hangs behind, distracted by a cat lounging coyly in the sun. Kasper calls back to him – what does Amin think of the contested nuts – but we know he hasn’t listened. His attention is 100% with the cat – arching flirtatiously on the grass. It feels deliberate. It feels evasive. The dynamic is so disappointing! Why can’t Amin, who tells us elsewhere he wants to settle down with Kasper, embrace what is being given? It turns out the reason is fundamental and compelling. The fields remind him of the asylum camps.

This film pulled me out of my head in the screening room when panic was surging because of the generous, thoughtful way it approaches that relationship between Amin and Kasper. For me this is a huge thing in a piece of art: how specific and layered are the representations of relationships? How detailed and honest? And this really sang. During the most harrowing parts of the story, the documentary flies forward – also completely thrilling and engrossing – but watching that partnership it isn’t afraid to hold a frame boldly, just so we can observe the two and pick up the tiny moments which reveal something enormous. Miniature gestures. Brief looks. It felt radical for a text which is also so rigorously journalistic. Artistically exciting and deeply humane. A completely lovely way to trace all the bits of shrapnel from Amin’s past into his present, and project them into his future. A gorgeous, meaningful effort on the huge challenge that trauma represents in relationships – and it all meant so much more because I’d read it in the character’s small, animated eyes.

Recently I’ve been watching a programme on iPlayer called Couples Therapy. It’s this fly on the wall docuseries following New York couples working with a clinical psychologist, Dr Orna Guralnik. At the outset you think this could easily be a really frustrating watch, as wild things get boxed into neat TV packages – one ep about in-law stress, one about issues in the bedroom – but it’s surprisingly, beautifully made. Themes are pulled together tenderly and like Flee it sometimes sits quietly so we really get to see Guralnik at work. She’s always asking clients to look underneath whatever their disagreement was or their patterns of blocked, barbed communication. What is the fear that fuels the emotion? What prior experience taught them that was a wise thing to be scared of? In turn people insist to her that they’re warriors – that they’re always moving forward and those traumas don’t affect them anymore. But what the programme documents is the realisation that actually they do – and that every day those traumas make it harder for them to be happy. We can’t outrun them – they’ll always catch up. If we don’t face and understand them, they’ll continue to force their way through us in behaviour – like weeds stretching for light between neglected slabs of pavement.

In my partner’s work she encounters lots of trauma. Her relationships with asylum seeking children might last one conversation or for many years, but she always wants to be someone a young person can rely on. It means listening carefully and caring deeply – two things that take a lot of energy – and she’s honoured to spend it because that’s how she’s built. It’s how she organises value in the world. The mass of stories are difficult though. When things are bad, she wears them like an old, heavy coat wherever she goes. Imagine a stinking hot summer, but she’s still trailing round this thick thing from a week it snowed years ago. When we saw Flee it was six months into the Taliban offensive on Afghanistan in 2021 and she’d been working in hotels with newly arrived Afghan asylum seekers. So everyday new horrors, and a crushing message she fights to ignore, that as an individual her power to influence this stuff is limited. When she comes home there I am – stupefied by the whole thing. I want to give her something useful, but also know sometimes that’s the worst thing to try and do. And of course I’m carrying around my own heavy coat of troublesome shit. So when we find ourselves in a beef about division of labour, maybe it’s harder than normal to find understanding about where she’s coming from – where I am. Maybe we feel exhausted trying and go to bed feeling hurt or misunderstood. Maybe we bring that with us to the next situation in a few days’ time. And maybe soon a wall has been built up which no one can find a way around. In Flee Rasmussen asks Amin if he’s ever told Kasper the stories he shares in the film. The answer is no. Nothing can rectify the injustice of Amin’s experience, but the documentary does a really skilful job of showing us what remains at stake for him now. And it’s all going to pivot on how he and Kasper – as a team – handle the trauma Amin has stored up.