89 min | PG-13 | December 3, 2021 | Neon
A man named Amin sits down to tell his oldest friend the truth about how he got to Denmark. The story he has guarded for twenty years involves a childhood in Kabul, a vanishing family, and a lie he has repeated so long he half believes it. Animation is the only way he can finally say it out loud.
Amin Nawabi is a successful academic in Copenhagen, about to marry his partner and settle into a quiet life. He carries a secret about his escape from Afghanistan that he has never told anyone, not even the man he loves. The film is built as a series of recorded conversations between Amin and a friend who happens to be the director. What emerges is not just a refugee story. It is an examination of how a person survives by becoming someone other than who they are, and what it costs to finally stop performing that fiction.
Amin Nawabi voices himself, and his account moves between guarded composure and sudden collapse. He recounts the disappearance of his father and the scattering of his family with a flatness that reads as armor. Daniel Karimyar and Fardin Mijdzadeh voice Amin at younger ages, and they track the hardening of a boy who learns that telling the truth gets people deported or killed. The voices of Saif and Fahima fill out a family that fractures across borders and years. The performances live in pauses and breath rather than declaration.
Jonas Poher Rasmussen directs and writes from interviews with a real friend, and he uses hand-drawn animation to do something live action cannot. The animation protects Amin’s identity, but it also lets the film render memory the way memory actually works. When Amin reaches the parts he cannot fully face, the images dissolve into rough charcoal abstraction, faceless figures moving through gray smears. Rasmussen cuts in archival news footage at key moments to anchor the drawn world to documented history. The contrast between the smooth animation and the grainy real footage marks the line between what Amin will show and what actually happened.
This is a documentary that uses fabrication to arrive at honesty. Amin spends the film deciding how much truth he can survive saying, and Rasmussen never rushes him toward it. The form is the argument. A drawn face can confess what a real one cannot, and a man who has hidden his whole life finds that the only way to be seen is to first be obscured.