Jonas Poher Rasmussen sits his friend on a rug, asks him where home is, and draws the answer. The result is patient, frightening and far funnier than its subject suggests; the animation stiffens whenever nobody is in danger, and it hardly matters.
Jonas Poher Rasmussen has made a documentary in which almost nothing was filmed. His friend Amin Nawabi, which is not his name, lies on a rug in a bare room, closes his eyes and is asked what home means to him. The answer takes 89 minutes and most of a life. All of it is drawn: Amin on the rug, Kabul in the 1980s, Moscow, the slow road to Denmark. The only photographed images are newsreel, cut in wherever Amin’s story crosses the one the cameras recorded. It is a fine film, and we recommend it with one reservation: the drawing is weakest whenever the story is calmest.
The film draws in two ways. Ordinary memory gets clean lines and flat colour: a courtyard, a kitchen, a boy’s bedroom with a poster on the wall. When Amin reaches something he cannot look at directly, the animators put down the colour and pick up charcoal. Figures lose their faces. Lines scratch and smear, and people move through black and grey like smoke down a corridor. It is what anyone does when telling you the worst thing that happened to them, which is to go vague, and the film makes the vagueness something you can watch.
We were horrified once, properly, and we have sat through a great many screen catastrophes, real and staged. We will not say what the sequence shows or where it falls. The animation goes to charcoal so the people in it are shapes rather than faces, Uno Helmersson’s score drops to one low held note and stays on it, and Janus Billeskov Jansen does not cut away to spare us; he holds, as the people on screen had to. Afterwards we paused the film and put the kettle on, which we do not often admit to.
It is also, and this is the surprise, funny. The boy Amin (voiced by Daniel Karimyar) runs through Kabul in his sister’s dress with a-ha on his Walkman, and nobody in the street minds. A little later there is a poster of Jean-Claude Van Damme and a boy realising something about himself he has no word for, and Rasmussen plays it as comedy because that is how Amin remembers it. We laughed, then remembered which city the boy was standing in and what year it was, and the laugh did not last.
Amin’s own voice carries the present day. He is tired and careful and keeps correcting himself, and Rasmussen leaves the corrections in. Fardin Mijdzadeh voices the teenager with the flat wariness of someone who has learned to say as little as possible. In the present, Amin is about to marry, and the question the film hangs on is whether he can tell the man he is marrying everything he is telling Rasmussen. The director appears as a drawn figure holding a microphone, and the film never pretends to be anything other than two friends in a room, one of whom has brought a crew.
The reservation. The realist drawing is stiff. When people sit at a table or cross a Danish kitchen the movement has a hitch in it, and faces hold one expression a beat too long, so that Amin’s present life looks like a well-meaning public information film. The middle stretch, with the family waiting in Moscow for something to happen, is patient in a way that occasionally shades into slow, and the newsreel sometimes explains what the drawings had already shown. None of it is fatal. All of it shows in a film that is otherwise so sure of what it is doing.
Animated documentary is a short shelf with one obvious landmark on it, Waltz with Bashir (2008), and Flee belongs beside it. The animation here is not decoration. Amin could not have sat in front of a camera and said any of this, and the drawing lets him sit in front of us without being seen. The film has a reason for looking the way it does, and it is better for it.
Watch it at home, with the subtitles on and the phone in another room. It runs 89 minutes and does not go easy on you. It is also, under the boats and the police, a story about a man being allowed to stop lying, and there are worse ways to spend an evening than watching that happen.
