A call to action, a sobering first-hand look at the grueling ordeals refugees face, a story of love persevering against all odds, and a visceral, real-life thriller, Midnight Traveler is a unique cinematic experience that will hopefully snap us all to reality.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The Hollywood Reporter by Caryn James
Cinematically modest but full of social and political urgency.
RogerEbert.com by Christy Lemire
Midnight Traveler might have carried an even greater emotional wallop if we had a greater understanding of the feelings of the filmmaker whose work has endangered the lives of the people he loves most.
Midnight Traveler is a brutally honest film about the hardship and inhumanity a family endures and their bravery, love, hope, and, above all else, desire to control their own fate.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
What largely distinguishes Midnight Traveler is its anxious intimacy, a sense of uneasy closeness that pulls you into a family circle that at times gets very small, creating a sense of appropriate claustrophobia.
If nothing else, Hassan Fazili’s documentary, Midnight Traveler, offers a necessary corrective to the widely held contention that refugees have nothing to offer to the countries where they land.
Balancing rough-edge verité with highly composed images and a meticulous structure, it doesn’t preclude itself from finding something like poetry in its subjects’ struggles.
Fazili has made an otherwise-unblinking cell-phone verite film of the crisis of our times, a first-person account of what people who cannot live where they are do to save themselves. Nobody watching “Midnight Traveler” can come away from it unimpressed, even if some are determined to look on this crisis and remain unmoved.
Shot on three mobile phones, Fazili’s Midnight Traveler is a documentary that feels like a modern-day message in a bottle, an urgent appeal for help from a family that’s still searching for a home.
The suffering, fear and humiliation that they experience is balanced by moments of warmth and an artist’s magpie eye for unexpected glimpses of beauty. It’s a remarkable achievement.