Midnight Traveler

When the Taliban forces filmmakers (and married couple) Hassan Fazili and Fatima Hussaini to flee Afghanistan with their two daughters, they begin filming their time on the road, which includes running across borders, sleeping on roadsides, interacting with smugglers, and staying at multiple refugee camps along the way. Poetically shot entirely on three cell phones, Midnight Traveler immerses viewers in the ongoing and heartbreaking refugee crisis, capturing the family at their most desperate and yet most loving, as they try to stay hopeful without a place to call home.

“With Midnight Traveler, Afghan filmmaker Hassan Fazili, alongside his wife Fatima Hussaini, uses technology in a desperate and tenacious attempt to reclaim his family’s agency after they are forced to flee Afghanistan and make the illegal and perilous journey to Europe. . . . [It] is a film about a family, about the hardship and inhumanity they have endured, about their bravery, about their love, about their hope, and, above all else, about their desire to be safe and in control of their lives and bodies and destinies and fates.”—Gary Garrison, The Playlist