Jonas Poher Rasmussen

A man lies on a rug in a bare room, eyes closed, and a drawn figure holding a microphone asks him what home means. That is the whole apparatus of Flee (2021), and it is Rasmussen's habit in one image: a long conversation between friends, recorded like radio, then drawn so the man on the rug can keep his name to himself. Almost nothing in the film was photographed. The only camera footage is newsreel, cut in wherever Amin Nawabi's memory crosses the public record. It sounds like a formal exercise. It plays like someone telling you a thing they have not told anyone else.

He came to it sideways. Trained at the Danish film school Super16 between 2007 and 2010, he began with shorts and radio documentaries, and the radio is audible in Flee: the pauses left in, the corrections kept. Before it there were two features, Searching for Bill (2012), which mixed documentary and fiction, and What He Did (2015), and an early television film, Noget om Halfdan (2006), about his grandfather, the poet Halfdan Rasmussen. We have not reviewed them and will not pretend to a view. What they suggest is a director who has been circling one question for a long time: how do you film a person's inner life when the events are over and there is nothing left to point a camera at?

In Flee the answer is to draw it, and the drawing is best when it is frightened. Kabul in the 1980s, Moscow, the road north to Denmark: the animation tightens whenever Amin is in danger and goes slack whenever he is safe, which is the film's one real flaw and a small one. Rasmussen's other decision is to trust his friend's sense of humour. The boy Amin runs through Kabul in his sister's dress with a-ha on his Walkman, and it is played as comedy because that is how Amin remembers it. We laughed, and then we remembered which city that was and what year, and the laugh did not last. That is the film working exactly as intended. Rasmussen has said, "I didn't intend to do a refugee story; I wanted to do a story about my friend," and the film bears him out. Amin is a man about to marry, wondering how much to tell the man he is marrying, before he is anything else.

Our reservation is not about Flee, which we rate, but about what it rests on. The method needs a friend and years of talking; the producer Monica Hellström has made one film with him, not a body of work. He has since signed with agencies to develop further projects, and a stranger in a room is a different thing from someone who already trusts you. We hope he finds another one. Until then he is the director of one fine film, which is more than most manage, and the rug is worth an evening.