Midnight Traveler

A film that finds poignant family moments even in the darkest depths of the ongoing refugee crisis.

The combination of perspectives paints a vivid and hopeful portrait of a family, as well as an indictment of the refugee crisis.

Shot entirely on iPhones, the Afghan director's charming and moving documentary charts his three-year flight with his young family from Tajikistan, where they had failed to find asylum, 3,500 miles to the west.

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.

A film that should be required viewing for anyone seeking to enter the debate on the refugee crisis, not as polemic but as a digital box of surprises.

A powerful, personal piece of work.

For all that, I find myself (churlishly?) rejecting Midnight Traveler...

If one wants to realize the situation and the overall circumstances the refugees who flee to Europe face, one has to look no further, "Midnight Traveler" offers the best look in the subject, that of the "insider".

Washington and its European accomplices have largely destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Millions have died, tens of millions are on the run. Midnight Traveler records one case.

This is a first-person account of statelessness made with an eye for striking scenes -- not something that could have been put together by anyone who cribbed material from publicly available news sources.