1 year ago
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Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s film Flee created Oscars history with nominations for Best Documentary, Best Animated Film and Best International Film this year, and the Danish filmmaker says it was amazing to see that the story resonated with people across the world. The docu-drama is a personal story of Rasmussen's friend, known in the film as Amin Nawabi, who shares his hidden past of fleeing his country for the first time.
“I didn’t expect it at all (Oscar nominations). It was a long process to make this film. It started off with just me and Amin in my living room in Copenhagen, having a conversation. From there, it just grew. It's been almost a decade. I had never imagined we would be nominated for three Oscars, but it was amazing to see that the story resonated with people across the world,” he tells Firstpost. He describes the film as a story about humanising the people that you don't normally identify with. “A refugee, a gay person... it's kind of a double marginalised person, so for me it's really about understanding how alike we are and how even though they are refugees or gay, they have similar hopes and dreams for the future, to create a home where they feel safe and feel who they are,” he explains.
For him, it was also the importance of listening and sharing and how healing it is to be able to share your experiences and be who you are. Nawabi, a queer Afghan refugee, is also happy with the success of the film that begins on a tragic note, but ends with its protagonist finding happiness in Denmark. Talking about his friend, Rasmussen says that the success is also very overwhelming for him. “Like me, he didn’t anticipate that this was going to happen. But for him to see that people understand the story and relate to it, it's really heart-warming.”
“While growing up, he didn’t have many stories where he felt represented, so to be able to share his story with the world and people with similar experiences feeling seen or represented, it is really meaningful to him,” he adds. The two have known each other for 25 years, but the decision to make a film on Nawabi didn’t come to Rasmussen until 10 years ago.
“I had a fundamental curiosity about his story all along. I met him when I was 15 years old and he was 16. He arrived all by himself to my little Danish village from Afghanistan. I was of course curious to know how or why he had come, but he didn’t want to talk about it and I respected that but this story became a mystery in our friendship. It felt like we needed to address it at some point,” says the director. He says that his friend also knew that at some point of time he would have to share it as he felt a disconnect in his life.
“He couldn't connect his past with his present life. It became more and more complicated for him. He couldn't have close relationships because he was afraid of getting exposed. He said that when he would be ready, he would like to share his story with me. So, for a long time, I felt this was something that we could to do together. We just had to find a right way and right time to do it,” says Rasmussen.
The director used animation to tell the harrowing story, but it wasn't just to mask his friend's identity. “When you do documentaries, and the story takes place in the past you always struggle how to make it come back alive and how to make it feel like it's happening now. I thought that animation was a great tool to show Afghanistan in the '80s and Moscow in the '90s and bring back Amin's childhood home,” he says.
He also found animation to be the best way to show Nawabi’s emotions. The film is also packed with star power, thanks to Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau serving as executive producers and narrators for the English dub version. "They joined in much later. I think it was when the film was almost done and we were gearing up for its premiere at Sundance Festival last year," says Rasmussen. When he decided to make the film in English as well and attach some big names to the project, he immediately thought of Ahmed, British-Pakistani actor and rapper who won his first Oscar for Aneil Karia’s live-action short film The Long Goodbye at the 94th Academy Awards.
"First of all, he is an amazing talent. Also because he does all this work in representation of voices that are not often heard. As for Coster-Waldau, he is Danish like me, so it was a bit easier to get a hold of him. He also wanted to support the film," he says about the UNDP Goodwill Ambassador. Now, the director is working on an animation feature project, which is based on The Dane Trilogy (Dansker Trilogien) comic books by Danish talent Halfdan Pisket.
“It’s a story about violence and how using violence dehumansises you. There are some similarities with Flee. It is also about someone who flees his home and comes to Denmark, but then because he was exposed to a lot of violence in his home, the only thing he knows is to fight. It's in a very early stage. I am still writing the script,” says the director, who also has a couple of fiction films in his kitty. Going by his upcoming movie on comic books, it seems like he wouldn’t mind helming a Marvel film.
“I don’t know. If the story is well written then why no,” says Rasmussen, who showed interest in making a film on Spider-Man. “It was the one that I read when I was a kid,” he shares about comics on the web-slinging superhero.
Flee is streaming on Zee5.
Natalia Ningthoujam is a Manipur-based journalist. She knows how to smoothly switch from being a fan to a writer whenever needed. She tweets at @nattynick.
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