A conversation with Flee’s director, Jonas Poher Rasmussen

This sixth volume in the Docalogue series explores the significance of Flee, the award-winning and critically acclaimed 2021 animated documentary about one man's journey from child refugee in Afghanistan to building a stable home as an adult with his soon-to-be husband in Denmark.

The film is particularly notable in that it asks pressing questions about how stories of marginalized peoples come to be told, circulated, and consumed within contemporary culture. By combining five distinct perspectives on a single documentary, this book models different critical approaches to the same cinematic object, acting both as an intensive scholarly treatment of a film and as a pedagogical guide for how one might analyze, theorize, and contextualize a film. Through multiple voices, this book seeks to generate a complex and cumulative discourse about Flee’s significance in multiple areas including but not limited to: its position within the traditions of contemporary European cinema and animated documentary, its role within the broader category of migrant media, exploring how cross-cultural audiences make sense of refugee narratives, examining important epistemological and ethical questions about what is and what is not shown in the documentary, and how film is situated within the contemporary documentary industry, with its reliance on the promotional efforts of celebrity personalities.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of documentary studies, animation, migration theory, celebrity studies, queer theory, and global cinema.