Flee - Q&A With Jonas Poher Rasmussen & Gillian Anderson – Transcript

00:06Hi, I am Gillian Anderson. And my name is Jonas Pirasmussen and I'm the director of Fee, which is an animated documentary about a very good friend of mine. Hi Jonas, nice to see you again. Yeah, good to see you.

00:23I've told you this before and I'll say it again, I love this film so much and I find it so moving and challenging in a good way.

00:38It's such a window into life experience that a lot of the world doesn't have an opportunity to have a bird's eye view into and you've created such a unique and provocative way to tell what is a very, very sensitive and important story.

01:02And I think it's just a fantastic film. So again, congratulations for all the attention that you're getting for it. Thank you so much. Thanks. I wanted to start by asking you about your friendship with Amin and what it was about him or about his story that made you want to share it with the world.

01:30It basically was because I was curious about his story because he didn't want to talk about it. You know, he, I grew up in this very small village in Denmark. And when I was 15, he arrived all by himself from Afghanistan and stayed in foster care just around the corner from where I lived.

01:48And you know, we met up every morning at the bus stop going to high school and became very good friends. But I was of course curious about how and why he got there, but he didn't want to talk about it. And I of course respected that. But you know, it's kind of been this black box in our friendship all these years.

02:06And you know, we've known each other for 25 years now and that thing has always been there. So I think I had like a fundamental kind of curiosity all the time. But of course respected that he didn't want to talk about it. And then like 15 years ago, I asked him, and that was kind of the first time I approached him about doing something about this story.

02:30I asked him if we could do a regular documentary about a story. And he then said that he, that he really wanted to share his story at some point, but he didn't feel ready yet. So when he would feel ready, he would like to share with me and then we could do something about it. So I kind of had it in the back of my head for many years that this was something we could do together.

02:50And then I was invited for this workshop here in Denmark called any docs, what they combine animators and documentary filmmakers to develop ideas for animated documentaries. And asked me if I had an idea and I thought okay but maybe this is a good way to tell a story. And I met up with him and asked him.

03:08I was intrigued by the fact that he could be anonymous behind the animation, because you know, what you hear in the film where you see in the film is the very first time he shares the story. And it's really not easy for him to talk about so the fact that he could keep control over when he wanted to talk about it and not being in the public eye with the story was really what enabled him to start to open up.

03:29So that was kind of the genesis of the film. I had in past interviews that after you had interviewed him through the editing process, you'd realize that there were some other questions that were arising.

03:47And can you share what some of those questions were that you felt were integral to the story that you needed to add. Yes, but you know, some of them were just kind of when he started to share memories. Some of them would be a little vague. And I would kind of ask him to revisit those memories to see if there was more to it.

04:10But also, you know, during the process of just doing this use I did between 1520 years during the span of three or four years, maybe even five years I think. And kind of towards, you know, in the editing process I kind of realized, okay, but I also need to ask him what it meant to him to share his story, to kind of get the story out there.

04:31So those were some of the issues that it really laid on was to kind of go back and just talk about what this act of sharing kind of meant to him. And I have that in the end of the film him talking about, you know, how it's been for him to finally being able to open up.

04:51But so it was a long process just, you know, of going deeper and deeper into these memories, but also kind of at the very end it was trying to be kind of retrospective on what did this act of sharing actually mean to him. And was it hard to or hard not to impose your own perspective on it while you were making the film?

05:16I don't think so. You know, because it really came from my own curiosity about his story and how and why he ended up in my village. I think that was kind of fundamental for my approach to telling his story. I didn't have, you know, I didn't think I wanted to do a refugee story and then went out and found a refugee.

05:34This story really came from the friendship and me being curious about why he had come and how it happened. So for me it was really about listening, you know, just kind of having my ears there and just asking questions to what he told me. I didn't really have an agenda when I started the film.

05:51That might be interesting to hear is, can you speak to the importance of representation and the importance of telling a means whole story, not just about his flight but starting with his childhood and everything.

06:10Why was that important to you? I think, you know, there's something about refugee story that they're often just described by being refugees, you know, and, you know, being refugees is not an identity.

06:26And because this is told from the inside of our friendship and this is told from, you know, the first memory he has in Afghanistan, I was really hoping to give a bit more nuanced to the refugee story to say, OK, but this is, yes, he's a refugee, but he's so much more and every refugee is an individual with, you know, complex stories like everyone else.

06:44So just kind of saying, OK, but, you know, being a refugee is just a part of his life and to show all the, some of all the other aspects in his life was really crucial to me from the very beginning. I'm so glad you did because you really, you know, you, as an audience, you start to fall in love with this animated character, you know, because it is so three dimensional by the time, you know, you get to the harrowing bits.

07:13It's an interesting tension that starts to happen as a viewer to, to, to, I mean, I remember the first time I saw the film, I was gasping out loud, but I was watching animation, you know, I was watching these, you know, some of the very fine line drawings

07:31and, and, and really feeling, you know, for what had become a very, you know, three dimensional human being behind the, the animation. And I found that it was, it was fascinating to experience that.

07:52Yeah, and it was really, you know, it, my perspective kind of changed in the process of making the film work in the beginning, it was really about, you know, wanting to, you know, the courage to talk about, about my friend and how and why he got here. But we started doing this in 2013. And then, you know, the humanitarian crisis, the hit, the refugee crisis hit in 2015.

08:15And that changed my perspective a little bit because I thought, okay, but my friend just sees a refugee but now we have a huge group of refugees on the highways in all Europe. And, and that changed my perspective to say, okay, but it's not just his story. It is universal story about displacement, but also about that there's human faces behind all these displaced people.

08:39And more and more of them, as we know, and particularly from, you know, Afghanistan on a daily basis. Yeah, right now it's really more so than, than, than, yes.

08:53I want to talk about the, the innovation in this documentary because you've mixed full color animation with archival footage and also some very sketchily drawn images of the, you know, particularly traumatic scenes and

09:17I'm wondering what, what I've got so many questions about this. So what in the first instance what, what, how did you decide that you needed drawn images on top of the full color animation what what how did that decision come to be.

09:32But it really came from the testimony, you know, from the interviews and how he spoke, because you know, I was listening to the stories he told me and at times when he started to talk about traumatic events. He would become more incoherent, you know, he would slow down and, and, and sometimes he would even stop and you could tell. Also, I shot everything in video and you could, you could tell that now he was inside an emotion.

09:57Now he's not in a memory. It was just an emotion. It was not about what happened or what the things look like. Now it's just a pure emotion of being angry or afraid or sad. So we need to see this in the visual style of the animation as well. So we developed this idea that there's a lot more, you know, surreal and expressive to kind of support these emotions.