Dismantling White Supremacy Culture Resource of the Month

Reverend Sharon K. Dittmar, Congregational Life Consultant

This month I watched the award-winning Danish docudrama, Flee. Flee tells the true story of Amin, a child who fled Afghanistan along with his remaining family members after the Mujahideen took over Kabul in the early 1980’s. The film is mostly animated, in part to protect the identity of Amin (a pseudonym). Given the war in Ukraine, it is timely viewing. The film is currently available on Hulu.

As the film begins, we meet Amin as a well-established adult living in Denmark. From there we quickly learn that Amin has a secret that imperils both his current residency in Denmark and his capacity for intimacy with his soon to be husband. As a teenager, Amin arrived in Denmark under false pretenses.

As the documentary unfolds, we come to understand the impossible choices, exploitation, and suffering faced by Amin’s family once they became refugees. Amin’s deception (made as a child) pales in comparison to the brutality the family experiences from traffickers, an Estonian prison, the Russian police, and inhumane immigration policies. By the time the film ends, Amin’s deception appears as the only option for survival amidst crushing obstacles. Yet a quarter century later this lie haunts Amin because if exposed, he risks expulsion from Denmark. This is a harrowing prospect since he is gay and can barely remember his birth language.

For me, the power of this movie was how it shared the trauma and impossibility of being a refugee, whether in Europe, on the border of Mexico, or anywhere else in the world. I came to feel the vulnerability and exploitation of Amin and his family, and through the film witnessed their dehumanizing treatment by others. Incidents from Amin’s experience are captured in some archival video footage (for example, the time spent in Estonian prison/detainment).

Amin’s struggle (ongoing for over thirty years) reminded me of the 1961 novel by Joseph Heller, Catch-22. The novel popularized the phrase “catch 22,” meaning “a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem or by a rule” (Merriam-Webster). It is no coincidence that the novel questions mental illness, how to determine sanity, if sanity is desired or possible, and how to respond if the world is ill. Refugees like Amin live in a catch-22 of “papers,” violence, and stateless oblivion. Yet, it is the world that is sick, not Amin, though he and his family, the most vulnerable, pay the price of our collective ignorance.