This year, the Oscars rundown seems to be inflicted with a glaring typo. One film has been included among the nominees for Best International Film, Best Documentary and Best Animation. Some mistake, surely?
But no. Flee seems to be a new thing, though the blend of animation and real life has been around for a while.
The 2008 Israeli film Waltz with Bashir is generally considered to be the first full-length, animated documentary feature. And like that film, the Danish-made Flee uses animation to protect the identity of the protagonists.
Photo: Screenshot
The interviewee has been named "Amin" here - it's his voice talking with the director Jonas Poher Rasmussen. To maintain an air of semi-fiction, the animated Jonas is rather taller and blonder than he is in real life!
The story of Flee has been in development ever since Jonas met "Amin" nearly 25 years ago.
Amin was a refugee from Kabul, Afghanistan, which is where the story opens - a story, we're reminded, that it's taken Amin most of his life to get up the nerve to tell.
He describes how his family went into hiding. They'd worked for the Soviet-backed government, but when the Russians fled, the US-backed Mujahadeen took over and were out for revenge.
There seemed no alternative for Amin, his mother, two brothers and two sisters. They had to leave the country - and that meant the hated human traffickers.
Their services were both expensive, and extremely unreliable. And Amin's family could only afford to smuggle one or two members at a time.
As the title suggests, Flee is about the pressures on Amin and his family to escape an intolerable regime at home.
But fleeing is just the start. Getting out is one thing, but where do you go?
And reaching the West is no guarantee of safety. Even in liberal Scandinavia - this film was made in Denmark - refugees were often treated as an embarrassment to be got rid of as soon as possible.
In fact, it takes several attempts by Amin's family to escape Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, but that's by no means the end of the story.
This isn't just a picture of the plight of modern-day refugees. We've seen that several times already, though the atmospheric animation adds several layers to the radio-style documentary material.
But Amin has his own reasons to keep quiet for so long, and not just a reluctance to relive traumatic events.
Even years after settling into a new home, there are secrets he's kept from his partner, from his friends, and critically, from the authorities, to allow him to flee a past most of us can hardly imagine.
Hopefully, the success of this film may have done something to alleviate the suffering of the pseudonymous "Amin".
Right now, the rest of us are forced to see history continue to repeat itself. That's the trouble with films like Flee - the right people aren't seeing them.
