Cinema as a safe vessel: Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee

Abstract

The article discusses strategies adopted in Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s feature-length animated documentary Flee (2021) for crossing the cultural and emotional distance between audiences and the refugee protagonist Amin. Focus is on a central scene in which a group of Afghans sailing across the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s encounters a cruise ship from Norway, the crew of which reports the refugees to the authorities. Juxtaposing the scene with a historical cornerstone of non-fiction animation, The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), and drawing on theories developed within the blue humanities, I argue that Flee attempts to remind today’s White western audiences that their position as ‘dry’ subjects – safely elevated above sea level, socially privileged and seemingly self-sufficient – is not a given. While destabilizing the targeted audiences’ assumptions of safety and encouraging (a politics of) listening, Flee seeks to serve as a ‘safe vessel’ for Amin. It does so through the dialogic treatment of its documentary subject and its drifting storytelling, and by offering an audio-visual alternative to the dominant contemporary media depictions of people fleeing across the Mediterranean.