Hassan Fazili
Hassan is also the director of the film and the person usually behind the camera. He is a documentary filmmaker from Afghanistan who became the subject of a death threat issued by the Taliban following his 2015 documentary Peace in Afghanistan. Midnight Traveler is the true-life real-time chronicling of his and his family’s attempt to escape that sentence by fleeing the country and seeking immigrant sanctuary elsewhere.
Fatima Hossaini
Fatima Hossaini is the wife of Hassan and also takes the role of cinematographer/director/narrator occasionally. Over the course of the film it is revealed that Fatima was hugely responsible for the transformation of Hassan from a much more fundamentalist Muslim into the more secular revolutionary figure he would become which ultimately led to becoming an enemy of the ruthless Taliban.
Nargis Fazili
Nargis is the older of two daughters born to Hassan and Fatima. She is not yet ten years old when she finds herself fleeing for her life as a result of her father’s political influence as a filmmaker. She, too, shares the role of cinematographer since the documentary was famously shot using the movie camera capabilities of the family’s personal cell phones. Because she is not charged equally with documenting the more intense scenes playing out around them and instead is used more often to turn the camera on herself, Nargis becomes what might be called the “face” of Midnight Traveler. A general consensus has formed around the agreement that the most memorable scenes in the film actually featuring the family members are those which focus on Nargis, including a lip-sync rendition of a Michael Jackson which almost seems to have been deemed require mentioning of in any review of the film.
Zahra Fazili
Zahra is not just the younger sister of Nargis, she is the very young daughter of Hassan and Fatima. Zahra is just a toddler as the family begins making their escape and since Midnight Traveler documents three years of long struggle, part of the story of the is watching her grow up to become a partner in that documentation. One of the most intense dramatic points in the story is when Zahra turns up missing while the family is in Serbia and her father confesses in voiceover to being torn as to whether to film a search that could very well have wound up ending with imagery of his dead daughter. Fortunately, this could not have been film since her disappearance did not end in death.
