23 FILM QUARTERLY THE INCLUSIONS AND OCCLUSIONS OF EXPANDED REFUGEE NARRATIVES: A DIALOGUE ON FLEE Wazhmah Osman and Karen Redrobe Flee is a primarily animated documentary that recounts the hitherto unspoken story of a gay Afghan man, known in the film by the pseudonym “Amin Nawabi,” who arrived as a refugee in filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Danish hometown when the filmmaker was just fifteen. The two have now been friends for over twenty-five years. Using a dialogic format, they uncover difficult-to-access memories about Amin and his family’s escape from Afghanistan after his father was “disappeared” and discuss the new life that Amin sets up with his Danish boyfriend, Kasper. 1 Wazhmah Osman and Karen Redrobe watched Flee independently and then began a shared conversation about authorship, gender, sexuality, race, and refugee narratives. Given the long history in mainstream and popular media, as well as in academia, of marginalized peoples not being able to tell their own stories and of subaltern groups being positioned as the subjects of films in which white filmmak- ers and researchers drive the narrative, Osman and Redrobe began to think through the storytelling conventions of Flee. They aimed to consider the hierarchies of power involved with giving and taking voice, and to question whose per- spective the film privileges, why, and to what effect. Their conversation is rooted in a working collaboration to think cross-culturally about media, gender, sexuality, and differ- ent types of violence. What follows is an analysis in the form of a dialogue that merges interests and histories to develop a working model of thinking collaboratively. WAZHMAH OSMAN: As an Afghan refugee myself, I think it’s important to start by acknowledging that a number of peo- ple I’ve talked to, in the Afghan diaspora and outside of it, people from all over, have gravitated to Flee. They have felt that they could relate to Flee as a film that offers welcome departures from the usual representations of Afghans, South Asians, Middle Easterners, and Muslims seen in the media. Granted, the bar is low, but Nawabi is a complex and likable protagonist. KAREN REDROBE: The film offers a type of corrective to the “War on Terror” film by introducing a queer Afghan migrant narration, by really humanizing and giving subjec- tive points of view to the main Afghan characters, and by being collaborative in its mode of narration. Yet the experi- ences of female refugees seems to be marginalized or even erased or refused in the film. OSMAN: There are some really complex issues in terms of gender, sexuality, misogyny, and sexism. I’m really glad that this film exists and is receiving international attention and acclaim; for me, it also raises questions about other refu- gee films, particularly those that center women’s perspec- tives, and about why they have not achieved the same kind of circulation or mainstream success. It requires thinking through how sexism and misogyny and the political econ- omy of the media industry are interlinked. Because ulti- mately it’s the circulation that gives salience to some stories and points of view and not others. To offer a personal counterexample: my own codirected film, Postcards from Tora Bora [with Kelly Dolak, 2017], also employed animation and a similarly personal story of fleeing Afghanistan during the Soviet Afghan war. It, too, was very much a collaboration—cofilmed, codirected, and coedited—and also centered on a cross-cultural relation- ship, though left somewhat ambiguous. The key difference was that it featured two women. It was narrated from my point of view: I wrote the narration and spoke in my own voice, based on my journal entries. Editorial decisions were negotiated between three primary stakeholders: me, Kelly Dolak, and Stephen Jablonsky, who did the animation and also coedited and coproduced it. It was a truly independent labor of love, made with borrowed equipment from NYU and Ramapo College. REDROBE: Your film was definitely women driven, by you and Kelly, and featured not only your father but also your Film Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 1, pp. 23–34. ISSN: 0015-1386 electronic ISSN: 1533- 8630 © 2022 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://online.ucpress.edu/journals/pages/reprintspermissions. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2022.76.1.23 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-pdf/76/1/23/751692/fq.2022.76.1.23.pdf by guest on 17 January 2023