‘A Fox Under A Pink Moon’ review: Strong Afghan migrant doc blends phone footage and animation

Dir: Mehrdad Oskouei. Iran/France/UK/USA/Denmark. 2025. 76mins

A proficient younger Afghan artist charts her makes an attempt to go away Iran for Europe on this generally gruelling but in addition ingenious and fascinating documentary. The movie is totally based mostly on smartphone footage shot by its topic, Soraya Akhalaghi, over 4 years, which was then assembled and constructed upon by Iranian director Mehrdad Oskouei to create a compelling, shape-shifting mix of thriller and darkish fairy story – one which comes laced with animated sequences dervived from Akhalaghi’s personal dreamlike artworks.

Form-shifting mix of thriller and darkish fairy story 

Picked up by CAT&Docs shortly earlier than its IDFA competitors premiere, A Fox Beneath a Pink Moon appears set to go on the identical form of wholesome competition run loved by the director’s 2016 documentary Starless Goals, which adopted seven teenage feminine inmates of an Iranian correctional facility. Akhalaghi’s personal co-creation of A Fox Beneath a Pink Moon and her assured curation of her personal picture – which comes throughout right here as an act of defiance – may additionally conceivably attain outdoors the mature doc-fest demographic to drag in youthful audiences.

We first meet Akhalaghi in November 2019 in what’s described as a ‘dormitory’ in Istanbul. Each inch of the ground appears to be taken up by somebody sleeping, or attempting to. At first addressing her feedback to the uncle who introduced her up in Iran, Akhalaghi movies herself speaking unsentimentally about her plight. She’s a part of a gaggle that has paid Turkish people-smugglers to move them to Greece – an unlawful crossing that is named ‘a recreation’. The primary of a sequence of makes an attempt, this one doesn’t even get her so far as the seaside for the harmful boat experience to the closest Greek island.

An alternation between despair and hope is a part of the micro and macro construction of a movie which, ultimately, is about resilience; that of a younger girl, but in addition that of an artist who – within the absence of household, remedy, or any seen buddies – seems to make use of her artwork as a survival technique. She attracts, paints, sculpts and carves utilizing any supplies she will discover: soaking eggboxes to create surreal papier-maché statuettes she calls demons; utilizing mud to mould bas reduction murals on the wall of an deserted home on the Iranian aspect of the border with Turkey.

A tragic clown and a fox are recurrent figures in Akhalaghi’s graphic work, and the movie’s animation director Mohammad Lotfali brings them to life, inserting, for instance, a tutelary fox subsequent to Soraya as she sits on the roof of an condominium constructing in Tehran considering the pink moon of the movie’s title.

Akhalaghi spends many of the pandemic years again in Tehran – the capital of a rustic the place she was born to Afghan dad and mom who quickly disappeared from her life. Displacement – one of many movie’s essential themes – appears rooted on this younger girl who identifies strongly with Afghanistan regardless of by no means having lived there. She’s revealed to have a husband, who reacts aggressively to her makes an attempt to movie him. They each work as janitor-cleaners in an upscale rental. In a sequence of creatively framed selfie video segments, we watch Akhalaghi  taking out the garbage and sprucing mirrors within the bland luxurious flats of the Iranian upper-middle class.

It’s right here that A Fox Beneath a Pink Moon actually begins to inhabit its cloak of fable. She turns into a Cinderella dwelling with an ogre and, if there’s a component of self-dramatisation in her video diaries, this too looks like a coping mechanism and an act of braveness. It comes as a shock to grasp, two years into the story, that this good, proficient, girl who appears to have been by a lifetime of troubles continues to be simply seventeen.