Reading Response #3 (Flee): Defining “Home”

When home becomes the land thousands of miles away, does it cease to be one’s home? Does one truly feel at home ever again? Many refugees have to grapple with this notion of home as they find themselves leaving their homelands to embark on the unsettling process of adapting to their new surroundings. So when Ramussen begins his Documentary Flee by asking Nawabi, a refugee forced to leave any sense of home he had, to define “home,” I found it to be quite an effective and thought-provoking introduction. Is it cruel to ask someone who hasn’t had something in the capacity others have to define what it is? Our experiences and lack thereof change the way we view and define things; they change the weight certain words take on, and to Nawabi, the word “home” holds a heavy burden of his past. His experiences as a refugee reflect the definition he gives: “someplace safe, somewhere you know you can stay, and you know you don’t have to move on” (Flee 1:49), a permanence he hadn’t known for a while in his life. Ramussen’s narrative choice of starting with this question as well as the accompanying animations of running figures set the precedent for the rest of the documentary as it explores Nawabi’s struggles to live and deal with the everlasting trauma of fleeing his home, a pain that is no stranger to many refugees.

The way the documentary goes on to capture Nawabi’s story goes beyond the surface details typically told on the news about refugees, allowing the lifeless numbers and statistics to obtain faces, stories, voices, and most importantly, the humanity that they are stripped of. When reading such accounts on the news, it’s hard to find a moment to latch onto and relate to, yet when told on such a personal level as in Flee, we get to view the emotions, the fears, and the desires of the person and their nuanced story as told directly from their perspective. These universal parts of being human that the animations are able to capture are what we can understand and empathize with without necessarily experiencing the same plight. The documentary acquires this raw and authentic feel as we get to view the deep, heavy breaths Nawabi takes to prepare himself, the furrowing of his brow in moments of frustration and distress, the way he closes his eyes to relive his memories, and the way he pauses, reluctant to retell them. These little details in the animation carry so much weight to them that stays with the viewer throughout the entire documentary.

Moreover, the way Nawabi’s traumatic memories are intentionally depicted in this abstract, almost nightmarish animation devoid of both color and detail captures the indescribable pain that haunts him every day. This change in style is seen when Nawabi and his family were being human trafficked into Sweden by ship, in which his vivid memories begin to turn into a murky, gruesome depiction of drowning bodies and later into the harrowing shadows of the police that caught them. It’s as if we’re viewing the memories Nawabi buried in the depths of his mind out of self-preservation and is only now beginning to confront them, explaining the hazy effect and lack of details in those scenes. This stylistic choice allows the viewer to further resonate with Nawabi’s experiences through the feelings evoked by these scenes.

I was initially taken aback and hesitant about the choice of animation as the documentary’s medium, but I was ultimately swayed by it. It not only served as a way for Nawabi to stay anonymous, but it was also the best approach to telling his layered story in a way that allowed the viewer to connect with him. The versatility of animation to not only paint the physical turmoil he was going through but also the emotional turmoil makes it an extremely powerful storytelling medium.