TERROR AND EXILE (FLEE)

When Kabul fell to the Taliban last year, Donald Trump outrageously tried to claim the shambolic scenes of evacuation would never have happened on his watch if he had remained President.

Yet it was his administration's blundering ignorance that set the ball rolling on the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.

It was his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who at Trump's behest effectively struck a peace deal with the Taliban that sealed the fate of the US backed Afghani Government by signalling the plan to withdraw.

HR McMaster has described it as "a surrender agreement".

Olivia Troye, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence, also argued last year that it was Trump and Stephen Miller's policy of dismantling the visa system and capping immigration numbers that caused the difficulties in accepting Afghani asylum seekers.

And while Miller and others in the Republican Party in Congress sought to limit Afghani refugees to the US lady autumn, former National Security Adviser John Bolton also claimed a second term Trump administration would have mishandled the crisis in Kabul the same way as the Biden administration.

But hey, with Fox News, Newsmax, OAN and an army of conservative talk show hosts on your side, pumping out propaganda 24 hours a day, why not pretend all the problems in Afghanistan began with the current administration?

Attempts to limit asylum for Afghani refugees fearing for their lives is shameful in any part of the workd, especially while the West rightly extends the hand of friendship to those fleeing the barbarity of Russia's genocide in the Ukraine.

Uprooting your family from any homeland because of the fear of violence is traumatic.

It isn't an easy option.

And to prove it, people who take easy pot shots at asylum seekers should be made to watch Jonas Poher Rasmussen's Oscar nominated Danish animated documentary 'Flee'.

Winner of the Best Documentary Prize at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and nominated for three Oscars, it's an extraordinary story about survival in the most desperate of circumstances.

But it also powerfully conveys what it is like to live in constant fear in Afghanistan and also in exile.

Rasmussen's film is built around the story of Amin Nawabi, a thirtysomething gay Afghan immigrant living in Copenhagen who finally reveals the true story of his flight from oppression.

Names have been changed and withheld to protect Amin's family who scattered after fleeing Kabul in the 1980s, winding up in Moscow and Stockholm.

However instead of pouring out his heart on camera, Amin's story is recorded and told through animation.

From an early age, Amin reveals e knew in Afghanistan that he was different to other kids - listening to Aha on his Walkman while running around in one of his sisters' nighties.

He reckons he started to feel attracted to men as early as six years old and reveals that in his teenage years his big celebrity crush was on the Belgian action movie star, Jean Claude Van Damme.

However not only was it risky and probably life threatening to reveal his sexuality in a country like Afghanistan but his family also had to contend with the disappearance of his father during the years of Communist rule.

When the Communists' grip on the country crumbled in the face of a Mujahideen insurgency armed by the US, he and his brother, his mother and sisters fled Kabul to avoid the boys being conscripted into the Army.

Catching flights to Moscow, they arrive in a country struggling in the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and experiencing food shortages.

Another older brother, who fled earlier in the 1980s and is now working as a janitor in Sweden, arranges for them to get a flat in the Russian capital.

He scrapes together money to get some of the family human trafficked out of the country but cannot afford to bail out other members. 

Amin's family encounter a corrupt system in Russia where human traffickers take wild advantage of those desperate to leave and the Moscow police assault and steal from the refugees.

Rasmussen's animated documentary chronicles the hardships experienced by Aghani refugees as they try to leave their homeland and then Moscow, including in one sequence a desperate, failed bid to make it to Sweden by boat.

Another successful bid by his sisters to get out of Russia almost results in them and their fellow refugees dying as they are trafficked in a shipping container on a ferry to Sweden.

But what the documentary also does very well is chronicle the pain, the fear and the shame of refugees as they leave loved ones behind and adopt narratives given to them by traffickers to secure asylum.

That fear hangs over Amin even as he is interviewed for the documentary, with him initially misleading the filmmakers by claiming all his family died in Afghanistan.

He soon reveals the true story, explaining those who trafficked him warned him if he deviated from the story of family tragedy given to him, it might result in him being deported.

Such is his fear, he reveals that when he had a bad break up with an ex-boyfriend he had confided in, Amin feared he would alert the Danish authorities to the fact that he had lied to secure asylum on Copenhagen.

Rasmussen crafts an absorbing documentary which brilliantly conveys the terror of what it is like to be human trafficked and the trauma of asylum seekers who leave their homeland and their loved ones behind.

Like all great documentaries, it is the anecdotes that hit home the hardest.

One tale about Amin and his brother going to see the recently opened McDonalds in Moscow suddenly turns very dark and disturbing.

There's a devastating account too of an encounter with a Norwegian cruise ship during a failed bid to get to Sweden with his brother and mother by boat.

But the film and Amin also honestly document how the trauma of being a refugee negatively impacts on his relationship with his boyfriend, Kaspar.

Executive produced by the actors Riz Ahmed and Nicolaj Coster-Waldau, the work of its Danish and French animators is reminiscent of Ari Folman's equally stunning 2008 Israeli animated documentary about the 1982 Lebanon War, 'Waltz with Bashir'.

At times, the animation is also reminiscent of the pop video for Aha's huge hit song 'Take On Me' which the young Amin listens to on his Walkman at the start of the film.

However at a time of war and massive upheaval, as immigrants flee violence and oppression in Syria, Afghanistan and the Ukraine, Rasmussen's animated documentary is also timely.

A contender in three Academy Award categories for Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary Feature and Best Feature Not In The English Language, it is a must see - especially for those who make wild assumptions about asylum seekers.

Few films this year will elicit sympathy on the scale that 'Flee' does.

But will the film elicit the help that asylum seekers need?

('Flee' opened in UK and Irish cinemas on February 11, 2022)