‘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 talented young Afghan artist charts her attempts to leave Iran for Europe in this sometimes gruelling but also inventive and engaging documentary. The film is entirely based on smartphone footage shot by its subject, Soraya Akhalaghi, over four years, which was then assembled and built upon by Iranian director Mehrdad Oskouei to create a compelling, shape-shifting blend of thriller and dark fairy tale – one that comes laced with animated sequences dervived from Akhalaghi’s own dreamlike artworks.

Shape-shifting blend of thriller and dark fairy tale 

Picked up by CAT&Docs shortly before its IDFA competition premiere, A Fox Under a Pink Moon looks set to go on the same kind of healthy festival run enjoyed by the director’s 2016 documentary Starless Dreams, which followed seven teenage female inmates of an Iranian correctional facility. Akhalaghi’s own co-creation of A Fox Under a Pink Moon and her confident curation of her own image – which comes across here as an act of defiance – could also conceivably reach outside the mature doc-fest demographic to pull in younger audiences.

We first meet Akhalaghi in November 2019 in what’s described as a ‘dormitory’ in Istanbul. Every inch of the floor seems to be taken up by someone sleeping, or trying to. At first addressing her comments to the uncle who brought her up in Iran, Akhalaghi films herself talking unsentimentally about her plight. She’s part of a group that has paid Turkish people-smugglers to transport them to Greece – an illegal crossing that is known as ‘a game’. The first of a series of attempts, this one doesn’t even get her as far as the beach for the dangerous boat ride to the nearest Greek island.

An alternation between despair and hope is part of the micro and macro structure of a film which, in the end, is about resilience; that of a young woman, but also that of an artist who – in the absence of family, therapy, or any visible friends – appears to use her art as a survival strategy. She draws, paints, sculpts and carves using any materials she can find: soaking eggboxes to create surreal papier-maché statuettes she calls demons; using mud to mould bas relief murals on the wall of an abandoned house on the Iranian side of the border with Turkey.

A sad clown and a fox are recurrent figures in Akhalaghi’s graphic work, and the film’s animation director Mohammad Lotfali brings them to life, placing, for example, a tutelary fox next to Soraya as she sits on the roof of an apartment building in Tehran contemplating the pink moon of the film’s title.

Akhalaghi spends most of the pandemic years back in Tehran – the capital of a country where she was born to Afghan parents who soon disappeared from her life. Displacement – one of the film’s main themes – seems rooted in this young woman who identifies strongly with Afghanistan despite never having lived there. She’s revealed to have a husband, who reacts aggressively to her attempts to film him. They both work as janitor-cleaners in an upscale condo. In a series of creatively framed selfie video segments, we watch Akhalaghi  taking out the rubbish and polishing mirrors in the bland luxury apartments of the Iranian upper-middle class.

It’s here that A Fox Under a Pink Moon really starts to inhabit its cloak of fable. She becomes a Cinderella living with an ogre and, if there’s an element of self-dramatisation in her video diaries, this too feels like a coping mechanism and an act of courage. It comes as a shock to realise, two years into the story, that this smart, talented, woman who seems to have been through a lifetime of troubles is still just seventeen.