Editor Janus Billeskov Jansen On Honoring Amin’s Journey for ‘Flee’

Editor Janus Billeskov Jansen has cut some of the most original documentaries of the last ten years. Yance Ford’s Strong Island chronicles the personal hunt for a Black man’s killer in the early 1990s, and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is one of the most striking documentaries ever put on film. Last year, Billeskov Jansen edited International Feature Film winner, Another Round, and his work on animated tour-de-force, Flee, is some of his best work to date. He mixes memory and aching truth to tell the story of one man’s continued survival.

Flee is a unique animal. It’s animated but also jumps around in time. As Amin answers questions about his own story, different styles of animation come into play. Billeskov Jansen worked closely with director Jonas Poher Rasmussen to create a compelling narrative.

“For me, it is a documentary that is animated and not the other way around. It is not an animated documentary.  I really love doing these types of films, and that had to come first because it all came out with these conversations that Jonas [Poher Rasmussen] had with Amin, which, of course, is not his real name. One of the starting points was editing the conversations that they had, and building that together with what stories Amin told, to see what could be animated as a re-enactment. That was the first part. When we got into the editing room to actually edit the film, we had a certain amount of small sketches from some of the individual scenes. They were black-and-white and you could raise the head or open the mouth or make the characters blink or look left or right. You could be in a close-up or you could have a wider shot. They could ask for what they needed. Editing the dialogue pieces from scratch as the starting point felt so different.”

Throughout the film, we see newsreel footage from Afghanistan. It doesn’t serve just as a building block for the narrative, but it shows that Amin and his family came from a real place. It grounds the film in a reality across the globe. Billeskov Jansen reminded me that, at this time, Kabul was very different from what we think of now.

“The film’s budget had three parts. There was a budget for the 2D, full color animated part of it, and then there was the black-and-white, scarier sections. The final part was the more newsreel footage. We had to deal with whatever was possible within that budget, so it was edited with drawings together with actual voiceover to build the story. You could say that going through these three different parts of storytelling were laid out from Jonas from the start. It was the basic idea of finding out which parts would be most effective. For getting all the other materials, we had people looking for footage, and Jonas was looking too. A lot of people were looking. When we see the young boy running around in Kabul, it was an interesting choice to show the city, especially considering that Kabul was free at that time. There were girls without headscarves, there were movies, and that is a contrast to what people know and think Kabul is. That was an interesting moment to me to show that particular moment in time.”

In one of the most thrilling sequences of the year–live action or animated–Amin details how human traffickers led them through the woods to get to a boat. Atmosphere is everything in this section of Flee, and a lot of elements had to come together in order for the chapter to scare the audience and make it emotionally resonant. It’s moment that forces the audience to ask what they would do in the exact same situation. How much are you willing to risk for your freedom?

“It was a combination of having Amin’s voice in the interview and then to go to the actual re-enactment. The basic story was what Amin has told. We started very early on the script, but when we came to the editing of that scene, Jonas laid out the script to show what kind of sequences or words were necessary in the interactions with the human trafficker and the family with the older grandma. We started from there.

The difficult thing was to open that scene up to find out what kind of images were interesting there. We came up with this idea from pictures that I’ve seen in the last five years or so when people were coming to Europe. They came all the way up to Germany, to Denmark, and even into Sweden. We had this fence around the border, and people would cut holes in them and take their children. We opened up the scene from there, from those kind of images to show that they were going through the fence illegally. They have crossed some kind of a border–it could be a border between the woods or between two countries. Later on that scene, there is an argument about the shoes that light up with every step, and you keep seeing these little lights popping up. It was a complicated scene, I think, to show how the trafficker was cartoonish in his stubbornness. But you could say that the idea of a trafficker becomes more and more human with every step.”

Billeskov Jansen even admitted to showing how the human traffickers’ arcs change throughout Flee. They may start out more extreme to show their brutality, but then the story and the animation gives way to a more fleshed out character.

“The final trafficker, the one that takes Amin to the airport, has to tell him an essential thing. He tells him that he has to lie. You will tear up your passport and say your whole family is dead. That man is more detailed in his drawing, and he is a little more human. It is also important to understand that what he is telling is not just threatening. It’s threatening to Amin, but it will change his life. He also needs Amin to say that he made it to Denmark so he can make that phone call and get paid. It’s a different way with dealing with money.”

The final sequences of this film take my breath away–I will admit that even thinking of them gives me goosebumps. Amin is a man who has hidden so much of his life from his family and his partner, but it all concludes with a feeling of hope. The camera rests on open nature and then, for a brief second, it changes to real life. Weaving these stories together is something that Billeskov Jansen was very conscious of. Amin’s story is one of loss, but it is also about the dignity of being who you are for the ones who love you.

“The interesting thing with Flee is that it is telling two parts of Amin’s life at the same time. We have a grown-up man in his thirties who agrees to respond to whatever questions he is given. That is a grown man. He is taken back to his childhood and told to bring us to where he is now. After he talks about his father, we go back and forth with arriving in Denmark, and they are woven into each other. There is another story on the grown-up level of telling the story and looking back at how it had an impact on him.

When we get to the bar scene, it’s a frozen moment because it’s one of the first [times] where we want the audience [to have] a bigger, deeper moment of happiness. That’s different than the terrible stories we’ve heard about dreams never being anything really. That’s so scary. We have been through that terror. Flee is about home and family. Losing home is one thing and how to find it again, and when you lose home, family becomes much more important. When he finally meets his secret family in Sweden, he is also carrying a secret to them. We know it, but if he reveals it, it could ruin his connection. We think the brother might take him to a brothel, and that would also be terrible. He would lose everything. There you can say that we emotionally end Amin’s story. In that moment, we wanted him to be free. He is free. That’s such a fantastic moment for a documentary that is animated.”

Flee is in theaters now.