'Flee' Raises Ethical Questions About Documentary Filmmaking That It’s Not Prepared To Answer
on Jonas Poher Rasmussen's quiet manipulations
Danish director and radio documentarian Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s celebrated new film, Flee, is something of a rare bird: an animated documentary. The simple yet evocative 2D animation, commissioned from Kenneth Ladekjær and Sun Creature Studios, brings to life the story of Amin Nawabi, the pseudonym of a boyhood friend of Rasmussen’s who fled the Soviet-Afghan War in the late ‘70s with his family just to watch them be abducted, detained in border prisons, and nearly killed by traffickers over many years en route to safety. After many botched attempts and brushes with total calamity, Nawabi is finally, safely removed to Copenhagen. There he meets Rasmussen, gets a PhD, and plans to marry a man named Kasper, a decision that would have been impossible if he’d stayed in Afghanistan, or in Moscow, the only city his family was allowed to flee to from Kabul.
It’s impossible not to be moved by Flee. Nawabi’s story of survival is almost heartstopping in its bleakness and brutality, and the occasional moments of lightness and serendipity pierce the heart with gratitude. But however much you might want just to be swept away by Nawabi’s story, Rasmussen’s film raises several unignorable questions relating to the ethics of documentary—concealing the subject of your single subject documentary, the slippery nature of truth in documentary filmmaking, and the grave responsibility of telling someone else’s story chief among them. It is that last concern in particular that may ruin the movie for viewers, depending on their tolerance for narrative manipulation in a purportedly “fact-based” form.
Rasmussen is insistent from the very beginning that however imaginatively he may have been with the telling of this story, it is one based purely in fact. One of the first title cards reads: “This is a real story.” Not based on a true story, or inspired by true events, but the story you’re about to hear really happened, in the exact way it’s about to be told. Since the film is animated, you know you’re not going to watch Nawabi actually tell his story, and another title card explains that names have been changed to protect the privacy of the film’s subjects. Flee quickly strips back the audience’s ability to steer their own course through the material that’s about to be presented until the only choice they have, if they want to press on, is to put a lot of trust in Rasmussen’s hands. We hear Nawabi’s voice, but that’s it. That’s the only way he’s permitted to reach us. What parts of his story, in what order, accompanied by which images, which emphasize what aspects of the story, are all left to Rasmussen’s discretion.
That’s what makes his subsequent decision to structure the bulk of Nawabi’s oration around the theme of the inherent unreliability of trauma-inflicted memory so strange. Early into Nawabi’s story, he says, “They [the Mujahideen] killed my father, kidnapped my sisters, and killed my mother and brother.” It adds a dramatic heft to each close call that follows—you ask yourself while watching, is this it? Is this the bind they finally could not loose themselves from? But later, once Nawabi appears to have relaxed a bit and really gotten into the story, he reveals that only his father was killed. Everyone else is safe and alive, “scattered across Europe.” The initial suppression of facts came straight from the smuggler who many years ago got him to Denmark. With his mother and brother still marooned in Moscow, he smuggler coached Nawabi to lie about being an orphan to protect all three of them. He had to repeat the story so many times that, no matter the pain it caused, it stuck.
It’s a powerful moment that illustrates the film’s main insight: that even if a refugee manages to flee in one piece, the flight itself can be so scarring that life in a land of safety becomes its own kind of internal war. But when other minor inconsistencies begin to appear in Nawabi’s story, it leaves the viewer wondering just how far this thematic exploration goes. Is it an intentional disorienting effect on the part of Rasmussen, a simple error on Nawabi’s part, or a failure to fact check what we have been assured is an air-tight production? Take Nawabi’s casual mention that his eldest brother, who settled in Sweden, “fled Afghanistan in the ‘80s to avoid fighting in the war.” Yet Flee states that Nawabi’s family left the country in 1979, without even any mention of an eldest brother. It’s a small inconsistency, one that should pale in comparison to the film’s noble, humanitarian aims. But it’s like that old expression with the fly in the cake batter—even if you fish it out, you’re going to hyper-scrutinize every subsequent lump, wrinkle, and fold.
There’s a reason that anonymous sources have become almost completely unacceptable in the field of journalism, and why there’s just as much skepticism of their use in documentary. What’s to stop a documentarian from using anonymity to corral their story in a direction that the raw material simply wouldn’t allow it to go? Documentary as a form purports to be fact, straight from the mouths of its sources. Of course, every film, no matters its pretenses to authenticity and altruism is the product of complete and utter manipulation. Every film is just a bunch of scenes until an editor fashions them into a story. And when the story you’re telling is someone else’s, the responsibility is of the utmost graveness and sobriety. You are literally asking for someone’s life—asking them to trust you with their entire life. No matter what spin you want to put on it, what you’re ultimately doing is packaging that life into a discrete, digestible story, and selling it to the public.
I have no doubt that Nawabi’s story occurred exactly as he said it did. But upon this flawed foundation of fact, now ridden with slight mistrust, I recoil from Flee’s B-plot. Most of the movie is just Nawabi lying face up on what looks like an operating table or a therapist’s couch answering the questions Rasmussen asks him, while he sits by and takes notes (the racial, colonial, and economic optics of this scene are noted, but will have to be set aside for now). The memories Nawabi (or is it Rasmussen?) dredges up provide us portals via animation into the past. Meanwhile in the present, Nawabi struggles to overcome the effects that long suppressing his story have wrought on him. Namely, his fiancé wants to move to the country and settle down, but Nawabi, who has spent most of his life having to stay ready to flee at a moment’s notice, associates stability itself with danger. Nawabi’s story is harrowing enough, but Rasmussen ups the stakes by hinging Nawabi’s future happiness to the very act of unburdening his story to Rasmussen. I’m not sure what ultimately leaves me colder, that the viewer’s hopes for narrative closure are affixed to Nawabi’s being compliant with the interview process, or that Nawabi is finally, conveniently able to achieve that closure and move on with this life once the interview has wrapped.
It’s one thing to ask someone to turn their past into a story. It’s another thing to create a story out of the random, unpredictable mess of their present in order to put a bow on your neat little package of their life. We are assured that Nawabi approved of this telling of his story at multiple points in the development process. It would be impossible to fact check that, and anyhow, it scarcely matters. His story doesn’t belong to him anymore.
