“Flee” (M) ****

WRITER/director/friend Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s movie tells about a real man who has endured and grown strong after a vicissitude-crammed life that most first-world people would have found difficult, impossible even, to survive. 

His name, more correctly the pseudonym he has adopted for safety, is Amin Nawabi. Afghan by birth, he now lives in Denmark, which took him after the experiences depicted in the film.

Standing well beyond the genre limit into which most animated features fall, “Flee” has garnered a swarm of awards (41 to date) and nominations (38 ditto). Heading the list are nominations in two categories at the Oscars five weeks hence. Two categories? Documentary feature and animated feature. If that seems like a contradiction in terms, well, you’d better believe it.

It has a plot, which is unusual for a feature-length documentary. Amin, who now lives as openly gay, had barely any gay experience before he went to high school in Denmark, where being gay is less offensive. 

The other thing is the particularly gruesome circumstances of his escape from Russia via human traffickers. His sisters and other refugees nearly die in a shipping container bound for Sweden. 

He and other desperate migrants march through a forest at night before being stuffed inside a small boat with no radio that gets stranded in the middle of the Baltic Sea during a torrential downpour. They think a passing cruise ship is saving them but instead they’re taken to Estonia, held in appalling conditions, then deported back to Russia. 

His eldest brother, in Sweden, on whom the family depended to pay human traffickers, made very little money as a lowly-paid cleaner. A better, more expensive trafficker would send only one family member at first, and Amin was the chosen one.

The different visual styles in “Flee” combine animation with reality footage to enhance the content. It’s an effective device that speaks for itself. Sometimes it shrieks it. Either way, the effect is profound.

At Palace Electric and Dendy