The Film 'Flee' Reveals The Truth About A Man's Untold Refugee Story
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2022
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Flee tells the story of a boy whose family left Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Now an adult and identified by an alias to protect him and his family, Amin Nawabi reveals a painful secret about his childhood journey to Denmark—a secret he has told almost no one.
The film opens with the question: "What does the word 'home' mean to you?"
Nawabi gives NPR his first interview with a news outlet, along with the director of "Flee," Jonas Poher Rasmussen.
In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.
Email us at considerthis@npr.org.
See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.
NPR Privacy Policy
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | What does the word home mean to you? That question opens the animated documentary Flea. |
| 0:06.4 | For Amin Nawabi, home was Kabul Afghanistan, until the Mojahadin took over when he was a child |
| 0:12.0 | forcing him to escape to Europe. He had not shared the details of that story, even with his closest |
| 0:18.5 | friends, before he agreed to make this movie with one of his oldest friends. |
| 0:24.0 | I wanted to tell that story also to the entire world that there is more into this concept of being |
| 0:31.3 | a refugee, there is human beings behind this concept and they are not much different than it |
| 0:38.6 | were else and we need to see the people in not just abstract concept. |
| 0:44.3 | Amin Nawabi is a pseudonym to protect his true identity. The old friend who convinced him to make |
| 0:49.5 | this movie is Jonas Paul Rosmoson, the director. They started working on this project 10 years ago. |
| 0:56.4 | We've been talking about this, discussing this for quite some time, but I think in recent years |
| 1:03.6 | and I also wanted to tell this story because I felt that there weren't many stories about refugees. |
| 1:10.4 | We knew very little in what we knew were often not very positive and often people had very |
| 1:19.4 | little understanding what it means to be a refugee. We never really heard about refugees, |
| 1:25.0 | about their lives, their experiences, prior to their journey in their home countries. |
| 1:31.5 | The movie has already made Oscar's history. It's nominated for best documentary, animated |
| 1:36.4 | feature and international film. Nawabi found that watching his own story through animation gave |
| 1:42.8 | him new insights into his experience. Revisiting these experiences, I kind of felt that I knew how things |
| 1:50.5 | would be or how I felt back then, but it was not the same so many years after. |
| 1:56.8 | Like when he was in Russia and he got kicked out of school because he didn't have proper legal |
| 2:00.9 | documentation. I think it was a lot of different emotions. I was of course sad for |
| 2:10.1 | that that could happen in that as refugees your basic human rights are being violated. I mean |
| 2:16.2 | everybody has a I mean in the West at least the right to go to school. There are very few people |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.