THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MASTERPIECE
Sometimes it’s hard to get to the point with friends. There is the fear of being clumsy, of awakening secret violence, of crying over his mess… It took Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen more than twenty years to ask his high school friend how he got to Denmark, at the age of 15, in the 1990s. There followed a dozen interviews in which Amin recounts all about the death he has come close to since the disappearance of his father, a dissident in Kabul, arrested by mujahideen forces in 1989. And then his family’s decision to leave the capital, their exile to Moscow on a tourist visa, the wait for immigration papers, the corrupt police, the desperate attempts to smuggle his siblings into the -drops in Europe…
Inspired by Israeli film Waltz with Bashir (2008), by Ari Folman, nourished by testimonies from former soldiers of the Lebanon war in 1982, Jonas Poher Rasmussen chose the form of the animated documentary to preserve his friend’s anonymity while showing the face of a man whose speech is free for the first time. As in life, the discovery of truth does not happen all at once. It is done through reflections, hesitations, emotions that we see pass like shadows in the eyes of the interviewee, lying on an Afghan blanket. This recurring shot, face of today on motif of yesterday, tells in this admirable metaphor of simplicity the double hearth life of Amin, who still bears the traumas of his childhood when he became a professor at the faculty and lives in a nice apartment with her partner in Copenhagen.
Sensitive trajectory
Faithful to the sensitive trajectory of his friend’s story, Rasmussen succeeds, in a complexity that subtly hides from our gaze, in adding to the memory of his friend’s emotions those provided by his memories: the slightly mocking tenderness of Amin on his first love emotions is represented by the winks of Van Damme and Bollywood stars emerging from the posters of his teenage room. His inner delight at hearing Danish pop playing in his pink Walkman as he ran through the streets of Kabul leads to a sequence of pencil sketches reminiscent of the famous music video by Norwegian band A-ha take on me.
Extracts from the television news of the time remind us at regular intervals of the reality behind the satirical drawing.
These memories contrast with the cynicism of the darker episodes of his odyssey, one of the most graphic of which we will reveal here: dozens of refugees cross the Baltic Sea aboard a leaky tub. Against the death that seems very close, a glimmer of hope arises. A cruise ship the size of three blocks of buildings arrives at their height. Saved? Click-clack. The tourists gathered on the first bridge take pictures of the exiles while a loudspeaker announces the arrival of the police. Added to this are excerpts from the television news of the time, which at regular intervals recall the reality behind the satirical drawing.
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