Mid­night Traveler

A bug-bear of this writer is how fre­quent­ly the term ​“human­is­ing” is rolled out to dis­tin­guish a film about mar­gin­alised peo­ple – as if, until ​‘X’ film, it was wide­ly unclear as to whether refugees or the home­less or whom­so­ev­er else were human beings. Some­times this fault is baked into a film when its creator’s only goal is to lux­u­ri­ate in a subject’s woes under the guise of per­form­ing a pub­lic service.

In any event, the refugee cri­sis is an ongo­ing fact of our world, and those on all sides of the indus­try should be past the point of mar­vel­ling that peo­ple forced to flee their home­lands to sur­vive are as wor­thy and com­plex as any­one else.

Mid­night Trav­el­er is an immer­sive doc­u­men­tary shot on three mobile phones by Has­san Fazili, and it exists on terms way beyond spe­cial plead­ing. It is a sus­pense­ful adven­ture sto­ry, a psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­file of a fam­i­ly on the run and, most poignant­ly, an inti­mate por­trait of two young chil­dren adopt­ing adult behav­iours as a mat­ter of survival.

Has­san Fazili is a film­mak­er from Afghanistan whose work led to a Tal­iban boun­ty on his head. He, his wife Fati­ma, and two daugh­ters, Nar­gis (eight) and tiny Zahra, sought asy­lum in Tajik­istan where they lived for 14 months. The film begins in 2016 as they are being sent back to Afghanistan. They plot a new route to safe­ty through Iran, then Turkey, then to whichev­er Euro­pean coun­try will have them. The film charts a 3,500 mile jour­ney that takes three years because of the busi­ness of enforced wait­ing, liv­ing in deten­tion cen­tres with bound­aries marked by barbed wire fences.

Mid­night Traveler’s intrigue lies in a breadth of tone which runs from high-stakes thriller in places, as Fati­ma weeps in fear after a traf­fick­er threat­ens to kid­nap Nar­gis and Zahra, to the joy­ful­ly lac­er­at­ing qual­i­ties of a rom­com in a domes­tic scene that fea­tures Fati­ma (also an artist) and Has­san debat­ing whether being a film­mak­er gives you a license to do what­ev­er you want. There is a meta- tex­tu­al com­men­tary here that comes into its own lat­er in a camp in Serbia.

Tiny angel Zahra has been miss­ing for an hour and some­thing has told Has­san to search the bush­es. In a voiceover record­ed lat­er, he says he was think­ing of point­ing his cam­era at the bush­es. Find­ing his daughter’s corpse would cre­ate an extra­or­di­nary cin­e­mat­ic moment. By con­fess­ing this father-vs-film­mak­er dilem­ma to the view­er, the splin­tered men­tal­i­ty nur­tured by doc­u­men­tary-mak­ing is slammed home.

Wast­ing no time in try­ing to con­vince us that, ​‘Hey, we’re humans!’ Mid­night Trav­el­er allows plen­ty of space for its unique char­ac­ters to fill the frame. Idio­syn­crasy is cen­tral to this sto­ry – be it Nar­gis let­ting off ener­gy with a wild dance to Michael Jackson’s ​‘They Don’t Care About Us’, or footage of many feet pur­su­ing a per­ilous route through the for­est to cross yet anoth­er bor­der. This is a film that evi­dences William Blake’s ​“see­ing the world in a grain of sand”.

Has­san doesn’t need to pro­vide a grand fram­ing device. You sense their pow­er­less­ness, you are embed­ded with­in it. There is no omni­scient cam­era to take the audi­ence away because there is no free­dom of move­ment for the Fazilis.