How do you say homosexual in Afghan? You don’t. There isn’t a word for it. I came to this knowledge by watching an animated documentary, a hybrid so rare as to border on oxymoronic. Flee is a biographical bolt that spans 20 years in the life of Amin as he makes his way from his war torn homeland to Denmark by way of Russia, at the time the only country to offer a tourist visa. For the first time in his life, Amin shares with a friend the soul-crushing events and seemingly insurmountable loss he has endured, moments of which are startlingly brought to life. Without the availability of video equipment to capture Amin’s journey, filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen adopts three modes of storytelling to recreate the facts: the occasional insertion of 16mm archival footage stands in stark contrast to the simplified animation that vivifies the character drama or the nightmare explosions of faceless charcoal blurs that best sum up the whirlpool of desperation. At one point, Amin thought homosexuality was a curable disease, and without this look back into his past, the nuptials that close the picture might never have been. (2021) — Scott Marks
This movie is not currently in theaters.