by Runnie Exuma - October 2019 

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    In March of 2015, director Hassan Fazili finds himself on his journey to Hell when the Taliban puts a bounty on his head after raiding his family’s Art Café in Kabul, an underground haven for young Afghans denouncing the country’s staunchly conservative lifestyle.  A story comprised of more than three years of phone camera footage, Midnight Traveler is a patchwork story piecing together moments of Fazili and his family’s journey to provide a detailed, raw portrayal of life as Afghan refugees struggling to find a better life. 

 

As noted by the film, Fazili and his wife Fatima Hussaini are undeniably, filmmakers at heart. Well known in Kabul’s artist circles and filmmaking communities, he’s directed numerous Afghan theatrical productions, television shows, and films, among which includes his documentary on Mullah Tur Jan, a former commander for the Taliban, outspoken against the militant organization’s motivations. Following the documentary release, Mullah Tur Jan is murdered by the Taliban and Fazili’s life is subsequently put at stake, thus kickstarting he and his family’s 5700 kilometer expedition from Afghanistan to Germany.

    In a desperate attempt to leave Afghanistan, Hassan and his family first immediately flee to Tajikistan, a failed operation that ends in them later being deported back to Afghanistan.  The situation becoming more pressing, Hassan and Fatima embark on the perilous journey across Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary largely by foot, with their two young daughters, Nargis and Zahra, seeking asylum within the European Union. Descending further into their own personal hell, they find themselves stateless, crossing borders while rendered victim to the ambiguities of backwards, rigid migration laws and a complicated nexus of regulations and legal precedents dictating immigration and asylum cases in Europe.

This journey, shot entirely on three camera phones, is captured over a span of three years  and includes Hassan and his family being left stranded by smugglers in Bulgaria, camping in dense, freezing European forest, and sleeping in the hallways of refugee camps already at maximum capacity.

    Hassan and his family travel from various camps, providing insight into the deplorable conditions that refugees are forced to accept and what it means to exist as stateless bodies without a permanent home.  After being abandoned by a greedy smuggler, Fazili and his family land are caught, arrested, and placed in grimy quarters at a refugee camp in Bulgaria. In one scene, Hassan grows concerned with the mosquito bites and boils that have begun appearing on Nargis and Zahra’s skin, while Fatima sprays and disinfects alls of the surfaces, citing the thousands of feet that have passed through their room.

 

    In Bulgaria, the family is additionally met with xenophobic violence spurred from the rising tide of nationalism present in Bulgaria and other European  countries in response to the European migrant crisis. The family and other refugees are attacked by a gang of men while in the midst of a shopping trip; Hassan gets punched in the face while protecting his daughters. Days later, he films the threatening chants of a  nationalist mob posted outside of the refugee camp that leaves refugees being tased and beaten up, with no help from Bulgarian police. 

      Bulgaria no longer safe, they make the trip to Belgrade, Serbia - the part of the journey that climaxes when Zahra goes missing for over an hour in the refugee camp. There, Fazili sheds light on his afflictions with filmmaking, and the moral shortcomings of filming “Midnight Traveler” - capturing, reproducing, and commodifying death, tragedy, and gratuitous violence - for the sake of a “good film.” In a voiceover superimposed on the visuals from the Serbian refugee camp, Fazili narrates the distressing search for Zahra, as he was subconsciously imagining the ‘perfect’ shot in which he hypothetically stumbles upon Zahra’s dead body in the woods, and the impact it would have on  the course of the film.

     Though a family met with unbearable challenges, rejection, and defeat, the documentary morphs into a story of hope and resilience - it becomes “a journey to the edge of Hell”, not one in it. The stars of the film are naturally, the children, Nargis and Zahra, who are at the end of the day, kids - they are filmed playing games, relishing in the infinite optimism  and bubbly imagination that kids always have. Fazili films the moments when Nargis and Zahra build  a snowman, try to fight boredom, and run around the playground. In one scene, Nargis dances to Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us”, a song  topical to the thesis of the film, more specifically the disdain migration laws and state governments show towards refugees pleading for aid. The prominent themes of resilience and determination for a little life and a taste of freedom are reflected in the children, who the audience watches grow throughout the course of the journey.