“Midnight Traveler is a close-up look at what it means to be a refugee in the 21st century. Abused and dehumanized, the hell you need to go through to reach an uncertain future is presented in a powerful, intimate story, but represents thousands and thousands of people.”

A story about a journey to the edge of hell. This is what is told by Hassan Fazili’s documentary Midnight Traveler. Fazili should know, because the journey his film documents is his own and that of his family from Afghanistan to the EU; a gruelling three years filled with clandestine border crossings, getting fleeced by smugglers, spending nights in forests, and waiting. A lot of waiting. A journey through eight countries shot with just three mobile phones, Midnight Traveler is an incredibly intimate account of the ordeal refugees have to go through to find a safe place in this world. As the countries of the EU bicker about how many asylum seekers each of them will take, people like Fazili and his family are waiting on their borders in often degrading circumstances, in danger of abuse or being taken advantage of. Midnight Traveler is thus a political document whether it wants to be or not, but above all it is a human story that shows resilience, resignation, and the love that is holding people together.

In March 2015 the Taliban call for the head of Hassan Fazili, a filmmaker from Afghanistan. He and his family, wife Fatima (an actress and filmmaker in her own right) and their two young daughters Nargis and Zahra, flee to Tajikistan and from there apply for asylum in the EU, without success. After 14 months they are deported back to Afghanistan, where Fazili releases his latest film. On the day of the premiere, the Taliban murder the lead actor, and Fazili and his family go into hiding. A close friend, now working for the Taliban, tips him off, and Fazili decides to leave Afghanistan for good. And so begins the journey to the edge of hell.

These words are spoken by Fazili’s daughter Nargis at the beginning of the film, when she recites part of a book her father is reading. At that time the text sounds ominous yet still poetic, but when over the next 90 minutes words become reality all poetry is gone. It starts off almost as an adventure, the voyage from Afghanistan through Iran and Turkey and eventually to Bulgaria relatively smooth sailing, nights of sleeping under the stars notwithstanding. The family moves from midnight trips in packed vans to safe houses in the woods as part of a group of people desperate to reach freedom and safety. Nargis steals prunes from an orchard to have something to eat, like sneaking candy out of your local store (admit it, we’ve all done it when we were young). But things start to get dire when they are bamboozled by a smuggler in Bulgaria who separates them from the rest of the group and abandons them. The family is arrested and sent to a refugee camp in Sofia.

What follows is a first-hand account of terrible treatment, racist attacks, and endless waiting in camps and shelters, hoping to be allowed to take the next step in their journey. At one point they spend over a year in a camp in Serbia. Inevitably stress and boredom take their toll on Hassan and Fatima’s marriage and on the mood of the children. As they get settled into living in the Serbian camp, life becomes almost normal again, with happy moments followed by times of frustration and fear. The film mixes in scenes that could be from a Funniest Home Videos show. In an ironic scene we see Nargis dancing to Michael Jackson’s They Don’t Care About Us, almost too on the nose if it wasn’t captured in spontaneity. What strikes you most about this family is their resilience, their will to keep going no matter how hard the journey. Hungary is the final stop on their road through hell, and the irony of finally having their case heard based on the same papers that they presented three years prior in Tajikistan is not lost on the filmmaker. But they’ve made it.

Edited (and essentially co-directed) by Emelie Mahdavian, Midnight Traveler is a gripping and harrowing, but above all personal story. The Fazili family invite us into their microcosmos, where we are witness to intimate family moments. Kids grow up, start to operate the phones themselves, thus becoming part filmmaker. But there is also the macro, of course. Midnight Traveler is a close-up look at what it means to be a refugee in the 21st century. Abused and dehumanized, the hell you need to go through to reach an uncertain future is presented in a powerful, intimate story, but represents thousands and thousands of people.