Flugt is a new production for 2021.
Seven years in the making, it seems to be another tired refugee story, but in anime form it evokes a fresh look. The American comic style and low frame rate give the impression of a comic strip, perhaps referring to the unpleasant and tattered nature of memories, or perhaps the less coherent images are the only way to convey the melancholy feeling of “every word cries for blood, every word is incomplete”. The twists and turns of the escape are a clever link between the bad history of West Asia and Eastern Europe all the way through the 1990s, ending in a condensed and profound indictment of the immigration policies of the Nordic countries.
Because it is animated, the rendering of fear is all the more effective: the anxious crowd in the container, the police smashing the door in the cat’s eye, the cold-blooded traffickers in the snow, the indifferent white men on the cruise ship. The audience follows the protagonist as he dives into his nightmare, yet is awake enough to know that it is not a dream. The intertextual telling of past and present is not new, but the pacing is just right. The vox pops test the audience’s emotional feedback to the protagonist, trying to make the audience truly understand, rather than sympathise with the odd anecdote on a superficial level. Emotions that have been suppressed for the entire piece explode in the understanding and acceptance of the family, and the protagonist walks into the bar feeling as free and loved as he does. (Amin’s angst will stay with him for the rest of his life, but he simultaneously needs the narrative to be redeemed, animated in a way that is clearly motivated by the need to protect）