Drawn from History 

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• Neon Films

Onscreen animation is usually about flights of fancy or manic goofiness, about fantasy and escapism and wild audacity. Flee'suse of animation is nothing like that. This is a film grounded in tough emotion and hard realities, impressionistic sketchesdepicting things half-remembered from the past, or a simple, almost graphic-novel style laying a difficult present before us.

Animation provides a vital cover for its protagonist, too: anonymity. Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen has severalprevious documentaries under his belt, but none of them were animated. Here, it protects the identity of his childhood friend,"Amin Nawabi" (not his real name; other details have been altered as well), as Nawabi tells the story of how, as a child, he fledKabul, Afghanistan, with his family in the early 1990s, and how he ended up in Copenhagen a few years later, on his own.Nawabi needs protection for many reasons, including his own psychological fragility, but the most important reason may be this:his asylum in Denmark is based on a lie.

Some will find that incendiary, a reason to mistrust refugees and asylum seekers. I hope the heartbreaking beauty of Flee willsoften such conviction. For this is a deeply humane movie that makes solidly palpable the desperation of those who undertakesuch dangerous journeys as Nawabi's, and makes an unspoken, effortless plea for compassion for their distress.

Home is, Nawabi decides at an interview prompt from Rasmussen as the film opens, "where you know you can stay, and youdon't have to move on." The simplicity of this becomes increasingly poignant as Nawabi relates the long, difficult tale of beingforced to abandon a happy home in Kabul as the civil war of the 1980s came to an end with the withdrawal of Soviet troopsbacking the government, and a few years later the Taliban—an offshoot of the U.S.-backed Mujahideen rebels—descendingupon the city.

Life in Kabul was mostly happy, that is, for young Amin. His father had been arrested by the government years earlier, thoughNawabi doesn't seem to know exactly what that entailed. Uncertainty, then, appears to have been a constant companion ofAmin's life, and that only got worse as he, his two sisters, a brother and their mother fled to Moscow, entering on tourist visasand overstaying them while they attempted to get to Sweden, where an elder brother—who'd escaped years earlier to avoidgetting drafted into the civil war—was living.

Flee flashes between the present—where Nawabi slowly overcomes his hesitancy to tell his story and struggles withcommitting to his boyfriend, Kasper—and the past, where we learn why he's having such trouble: "It takes time to learn totrust people" when you've been through what he has. "You're always on your guard," even around kindly people, as he finallyfound in Denmark after years of being abused and taken advantage of, by authorities such as police and border officials, and bycriminals such as human traffickers. (Growing up gay in Afghanistan, where, he says, there isn't even a word for "homosexual,"has left its own brand of confusion.)

The inhumanity of human trafficking, seen through several horrific journeys here—one for his sisters, another with his brotherand mother, a third on his own—is harrowing. The extreme vulnerability of refugees, including one brief encounter with a girl ina van that still haunts Amin, is its own argument for a complete overhaul of how we lucky ones in safe places deal with theunlucky ones who want only the security we have.

This is especially true when the same cycles of violence and suffering are recurring. Flee was produced over the course ofseveral years in the mid-2010s as much of Europe was hardening itself against refugees. The film debuted at last year'sSundance Film Festival (where it won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary). And yet we saw a near Xerox ofNawabi's escape from Kabul play out again this past summer, as the U.S. withdrew its forces, and the Taliban surged in again. Wearchitects of the crises that create refugees have learned nothing. We will almost certainly hear more stories like Amin's 30 yearsfrom now. A decent, compassionate society would listen to Amin Nawabi's trauma, understand why he kept his secrets—andstill must—and ensure that no one else has to endure what he has. Will we? Can we?