Flee: a young man flees Afghanistan through Russia and winds up in a happy gay marriage in Denmark (Sundance)
For the first time in my own life, I’ve attended a Sundance Film Festival screening (virtually).
You buy the ticket in advance, and I don’t really know why tickets can be sold out quickly for a virtual event which should have unlimited capacity. But there was an in-person screening (don’t know if this was in Utah) with mask rules, and a QA included. When you log on to your screening, you are directed to a virtual waiting room, and the movie starts precisely on time (10 PM EST last night). The video player did not seem to allow completely full screen (as do Netflix and Amazon).
The film was “Flee”, directed and written by Jonas Poher Rasmussen (Denmark), and tells the story of a young gay man (Amin, as a pseudonym) who escapes from Afghanistan with others in the 1990s, to (by plane) Moscow, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, then attempts to go Sweden, gets essentially shipwrecked and rescued and taken to Estonia, then back to Russia, and then through sequences not as clear, to Denmark, with travel to the USA, where he meets a potential husband (Kasper), married and settles down as a couple with a farm in Denmark and a cat.
There are family intrigues along the way, including another refugee who decided not to marry and have children (in Finland) in order to fight. At the end, Amin’s own family undergoes diaspora throughout Europe.
This is probably the first LGBT-oriented film I have ever seen primarily in animation. The film intersperses the animation with live photography from various places, especially Afghanistan after the Soviet retreat but before 9/11, then some of Moscow (very dingy), then Denmark and especially some of NYC. The real-life photos give a sense of the progress of history that started long before 9/11.
I don’t recall right now if I’ve reviewed any other films of LGBT persons escaping from places like Syria or Africa.
In the fall of 2016 I considered hosting asylum seekers myself and that did not follow through well after Trump got elected.
The film did not clearly distinguish between refugees and asylum seekers, as the sequence got complicated in the film’s last act.
There was an animated scene in NYC in a gay disco, and then a gay bar that looked like a rendition of Therapy in Hell’s Kitchen, upstairs, and it has sadly closed permanently because of the pandemic.
Supplementary QA
Sundance Film Fesitval venue, Egyptian Theater, Wiki.
Kabul, wiki
Moscow today, wiki
Estonian military hardware in Afghanistan
Name: “Flee”
Director, writer: Jonas Poher Rasmussen
Released: 2021 to Sundance
Format: 2.35:1 (in Arabic, etc. with subtitles)
When and how viewed: Sundance 2021/1/28 Virtual
Length: 93
Rating: NA
Companies: Cinephil
Link: See Sundance
Stars: *****
(Posted: Friday, January 29, 2021 at 10:30 AM EST)