Midnight Traveler
Directed by: Hassan Fazili
Written by: Emelie Mahdavian
Documentary/War - 90 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 15 Oct 2019
Written by: Emelie Mahdavian
Documentary/War - 90 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 15 Oct 2019
The recent immigration waves pushing out of the Middle East and North Africa into Europe is usually filtered through a dispassionate news lens buttressed by numbers meant to shock and whatever the latest tragedies to occur on the perilous routes are. Presented with nameless and faceless newcomers and various warnings that such and such country is unable to shelter the masses and other refugee systems are overwhelmed, it is all too easy to shrug off the arrivals, turn a blind eye to the situation, and let nationalist extremists shout in an uninterrupted microphone their proclamations of calamity and a disappearance of how things used to be. Then you meet the Fazili family.
Considered progressive by Afghan standards, the Fazilis face a death sentence back home and trek thousands of miles with their two young daughters. Along the way, ruthless smugglers take advantage of them, riled up mobs scream at them, and they encounter a series camps with a larger barbed wire budget than staff to sift through the chaos while stuck in this uncertain limbo. Midnight Traveler is not pro-immigration propaganda and it preaches no government or international organization’s party line. It is a diary. This is the chronicle of a man forced to flee, his anxious wife, and their two impressionable daughters as they travel by car, back of van, on foot through woods, and freezing in the nighttime all because they are now a statistic. They are only four of the hundreds of thousands who knock on Europe’s door every year seeking safety and a quiet place to breathe.
Considered progressive by Afghan standards, the Fazilis face a death sentence back home and trek thousands of miles with their two young daughters. Along the way, ruthless smugglers take advantage of them, riled up mobs scream at them, and they encounter a series camps with a larger barbed wire budget than staff to sift through the chaos while stuck in this uncertain limbo. Midnight Traveler is not pro-immigration propaganda and it preaches no government or international organization’s party line. It is a diary. This is the chronicle of a man forced to flee, his anxious wife, and their two impressionable daughters as they travel by car, back of van, on foot through woods, and freezing in the nighttime all because they are now a statistic. They are only four of the hundreds of thousands who knock on Europe’s door every year seeking safety and a quiet place to breathe.
Hassan Fazili was a filmmaker in Afghanistan, a country not prone to celebrate the arts and the vision of its homegrown artists. The reception for Hassan’s film about a local Taliban commander was more than rotten tomatoes, it was a death sentence. Denied refuge in neighboring Tajikistan and from Australia, Hassan opts to document the family’s journey west starting on “Day 1” and persistently updated with check-ins such as “Day 102,” “594,” and so on. Shot on three different mobile phones, the narrative shows us boredom on long car rides, suspense and alarm when running through fields evading border agents, and fright when smugglers threaten to kidnap the girls. Little Nargis and Zahra are innocents in this mess. Even if you are the most anti-immigrant wall building zealot, good luck looking Zahra in the eyes and telling her to go back to Afghanistan.
Midnight Traveler is a first-person point of view travelogue of sorts as we see what Hassan sees. However, it is also a sociological account of how eastern European countries confront the refugees streaming through their borders toward fabled places like Germany and Sweden. Bulgaria is the first long stay where inflamed gangs storm the gates of a refugee center and throw rocks at heads considered foreign. The Fazilis opt to flee Bulgaria’s shred of stability for even more nights in the forest as they reach Serbia. Serbia, intentionally or not, comes off looking relatively hospitable compared to its neighbors regarding the treatment of the vulnerable.
The Fazilis, and those they encounter on this most desperate of trails, are not ISIS as many antagonists and alarmists would have you believe. They are no different than your family; they just happened to born on the other side of a particular map line. This is why Midnight Traveler feels so immediate and effective. You learn the names of the nameless and recognize the faces of the faceless. They become people and are more than numbers. They have backstory, dreams, and little girls who just want to dance to Michael Jackson. There are other recent documentaries showing the Mediterranean Sea crossing to Italy and attempts by immigrants to acclimate to their new societies, but this may be the first years long “family on the run” story. Nargis and Zahra grow up. This messy film, shot in bits and spurts, will be their family heirloom later on.
Hassan is not 100% pure. He knew he was making a film and is the first to admit there were times he considered the cinematic angle before the safety and welfare of his family. Zahra goes missing and he weighs the ethics of filming the search and capturing possible devastating news on camera. There is also the paradox of the more pain and the more setbacks his family endures, the stronger his narrative push. Hassan recorded hundreds of hours of footage and editing it down to an 87-minute film with requisite pacing and structure must have been arduous when everything that happens to your family feels noteworthy. Perhaps Midnight Traveler’s most alarming takeaway is that the Fazili family is not unique. Thousands of families endure the mini-emergencies and rare relaxations in the most uncertain of circumstances, but now some of us will have a station to empathize from rather than only another installment in the long line of numbers and casual soundbites.
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