Film Shapes

I caught this Perth Festival preview screening at the Backlot last week and it's an ambitious film that also feels quite low-key, almost like the filmmaker, Jonas Poher Rasmussen wanted to downplay the fortitude of those involved. This works in its favour, as the hardships and menace that the 'characters' go through are accentuated all the more by the lack of histrionics. Flee is about a man, Amin (not his real name), who escaped Afghanistan and the Mujahideen in the 1990s and is now, on the verge of settling down to marriage with his husband, ready to tell the tale to his old school friend.  It has an interesting structure - it's mostly animation created to match documented audio interviews, voice actors doing 'recreations' of events, with archived footage of news events of the 90s (human trafficking, Afghan bloodshed, Russian supermarkets during the fall of communism, etc). Rasmussen says: “I wanted to add this footage to the movie so that every time you see ...