A scene from Midnight Traveler (Oscilloscope Laboratires)

Director (and cameraman) Hassan Fazili’s tragic and somber documentary follows the lives of Afghani refugees fleeing terror and searching for a home. Fazili is the film’s main subject, along with his wife, Fatima, and their two young daughters, Zahra and Nargis. After the Taliban puts a bounty on Fazili’s head and destroys an arts cafe owned by him and Fatima, the family decides to flee their home, and they end up joining other refugees seeking asylum in the European Union.

Together, the group bounces from Iran, Turkey, and Greece to Bulgaria and Serbia. The trek is absolutely harrowing. Besides fleeing from terrorists and dealing with unsympathetic state police, the refugees also have to face an unsurprising abundance of xenophobia in the countries they land in. In one particularly disturbing sequence, Fazili is attacked by a bunch of nativist hooligans in Bulgaria. The cries of terror from the children looking helplessly at their battered and bruised father are yet another painful reminder of the rising racist attitudes toward black and brown refugees across the “developed” world.

Fazili shoots the entire film with an iPhone camera. Interspersed between shaky but crisp footage of the family’s travails are poetic visual montages, replete with foreboding voice-overs of the father and his eldest daughter, Nargis. Fazili’s visual aptitude is at its peak here, and it is during these sequences that we sense that the film serves as a form of coping mechanism for the fleeing artist. Fazili really doesn’t know if he’ll be alive by the end of the film, or whether he and his family will be safe.

Yet hope is never completely lost. Moments of beauty persist through thick and thin, and one can’t help but recognize the importance of family and community here. Hazan and Fatima’s banter is heartwarming and indicative of just how vital frivolity is to one’s survival even in the most uncertain of times. Then there are the daughters. The eldest’s quite simply one badass girl. As far as what we can see, she trudges through with a relentlessness that would make most of us tremble in despair.

Midnight Traveler is an important film for our times. Fazili has given us an important and universalizing story, one that will hopefully shed light on the myriad of misconceptions about the global refugee and migrant crisis, one of the most urgent catastrophes on our modern-day horizon.