Refugee stories are not always obscured by our media, but they are often distorted, with broadcast news segments and sensational dramas twisting the extreme oppression and abuse experienced by migrants into entertainment for those of us with the right passports.
Rasmussen grew up with Amin in a small Danish village, where the latter arrived alone at 16 and began living with a foster family.
Aware that he was gay from the age of 5, Amin had kept a different secret for much longer: He told no one he met since receiving asylum status, not even Kasper, about the specifics of his life before arriving in Denmark.
Rasmussen is just as interested in how Amin has processed or suppressed what was taking place around him during his years-long attempt to escape Afghanistan, then Russia, after the Taliban gained control over his native country in the 80s.
We learn, in time, how this evasive communication style once protected him; it’s in his voice that we start to hear the ways past and present threaten to forestall Amin’s future, and how a nonlinear eruption of time—all the hours lost, borrowed, and stolen back along his harrowing journey—freezes him in a relentless present.
— Jennifer Lawrence Exclusive: “I Didn’t Have a Life.
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