In honor of the 95th Annual Academy Awards this month, see screenings of recent Nordic Oscar winners and nominees at Scandinavia House! On March 22, we’ll be screening the film Flee (dir. Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Denmark, 2021), the 2021 Danish entry for Best International Feature Film and nominee for Best Documentary Feature and Best Animated Feature, and first film to ever be nominated in all three categories.

Flee tells the story of Amin Nawabi as he grapples with a painful secret, one that threatens to derail the life he has built for himself and his soon-to-be husband. Forced to leave his home country of Afghanistan as a young child with his mother and siblings, Amin now grapples with how his past will affect his future in Denmark and the life he is building with his soon-to-be husband. Told brilliantly through the use of animation to protect his identity — including animated scenes depicting the past and present, interspersed with archival footage — Amin looks back over his life, opening up for the first time about his past, his trauma, the truth about his family, and his acceptance of his own sexuality.

Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen depicts the refugee experience through vivid animation in a moving memoir hailed as “a feat of humanistic filmmaking… a movie we will be celebrating all through next year’s awards season and talking about long after” (Harper’s Bazaar) (89 min. In Danish with English subtitles)

FILM TALK WITH JONAS POHER RASMUSSEN