A Haunting Migration Story Told Through Papier-Mâché and iPhone Footage
There are documentaries that inform, and then there are documentaries that consume you whole. A Fox Under a Pink Moon, co-directed by Mehrdad Oskouei and Soraya Akhalaghi, belongs emphatically to the latter category. This 77-minute collaboration between Iranian and Danish production forces offers something extraordinarily rare: a film that functions simultaneously as artistic statement, personal diary, and searing commentary on the global migration crisis. Premiering in Toronto after its award-winning debut at IDFA, this work demands your attention and refuses to let go.
The young Afghan artist at the film’s center exists in a state of perpetual suspension. Tehran serves as her prison of circumstance, a waiting room between the life she fled and the European reunion with her mother that remains tantalizingly out of reach. Rather than surrendering to despair, Soraya transforms her anguish into art, and the resulting creation becomes the film’s narrative backbone.
When Papier-Mâché Becomes Catharsis
Watching Soraya work with egg cartons and water, molding them into something entirely new, feels like witnessing exorcism in real time. The demon figure she constructs serves as more than artistic outlet—it functions as vessel for fears that have nowhere else to go. The eerie sculpture that emerges from this process carries visible relief, as though physical matter has absorbed emotional weight that might otherwise have crushed her entirely.
Yet the demon is not her only companion in this visual vocabulary. A clown figure appears repeatedly throughout the documentary, rendered in drawings rather than three-dimensional form. This sad-faced character haunts the film’s visual landscape, attempting and failing to reverse Soraya’s sorrows but trying nonetheless. The clown’s frequent presence speaks to something essential about the documentary’s approach: acknowledgment that not every story concludes with triumph, that sometimes simply persisting constitutes its own form of victory.
The Fox, the Moon, and Reality Converging
The titular fox emerges under a dreamy pink moon, and this mystical pairing carries symbolic weight throughout the film. Unlike the standalone animated sequences featuring the clown, the fox and moon exist within footage captured on Soraya’s own iPhone. This technical distinction mirrors the film’s thematic concern with blending reality and transcendence, showing how artistic escape interweaves with lived experience rather than replacing it.
The five-year collaboration between Soraya and director Mehrdad Oskouei yields something remarkable: a longitudinal study of growth that captures the artist aging from sixteen into early adulthood. Her TikTok-style confessionals, those selfie-moments where she turns the camera inward, reveal a face carrying weight beyond its years. These are not performance moments but documentation of survival.
Survivor’s Confession: Violence and Repeated Flight
The documentary’s most devastating passages emerge from Soraya’s own words and captured footage. “I am used to being beaten,” she states with matter-of-fact resignation, explaining how her uncle subjected her to violence after her mother fled to Austria. When young marriage arrives as potential escape, circumstances only worsen. Her husband Ali, face deliberately blurred throughout, intensifies rather than alleviates the abuse. The film presents brutal evidence of these attacks, random eruptions of violence that culminate in particularly harrowing sequences where audio of Soraya’s screams cuts to her swollen face as she creates artwork in the aftermath.
The camera rarely remains static during these episodes. Instead, it turns outward to document broader violence: emotional and financial manipulation, failed boat crossings, treacherous mountain journeys where traffickers abandon desperate asylum seekers. Throughout these sequences, her iPhone transforms from artistic tool into protective apparatus, offering some measure of agency in situations designed to strip all agency away.
A Comparative Lens: Two Documents of Displacement
A Fox Under a Pink Moon joins an emerging conversation about migration documentation, finding natural comparison with One in a Million, the Sundance prize-winning film following a Syrian refugee family’s decade-long journey toward stability in Germany. Both documentaries center young women navigating displacement toward European hope, yet they occupy fundamentally different narrative territories. Where One in a Million traces arrival and gradual adjustment, Soraya’s story unfolds entirely in suspension, documenting repeated attempts to flee that each conclude in return to limbo.
This distinction proves essential. The film offers no triumphant conclusion, no moment of safe arrival. Instead, it captures something equally valuable: the experience of existing in perpetual transition, of building life while standing on shifting ground.
The Power of Self-Documentation
Perhaps the documentary’s most striking formal achievement lies in its source material. Every frame derives from footage Soraya created herself, making A Fox Under a Pink Moon a collaborative work where subject and artist blur beyond distinction. This approach generates intimacy no external filmmaker could manufacture, capturing moments of vulnerability that might never have emerged before a stranger’s camera.
The Turkish border sequences, where Soraya trades bedbug bites for drawings left on shelter walls, exemplify this integration. Both images and footage express the same pain, different languages describing identical anguish. She becomes not merely subject but creative agent, documenting her own story while simultaneously creating visual responses to it.
Art as Resistance in Limbo
What emerges across seventy-seven minutes is a work both frank and poetic, acknowledging relentless hardship while celebrating the remarkable strength required to continue creating despite it. The documentary’s final sequence, capturing violence that would continue after filming ceased, adds retrospective weight to everything preceding it. We watch knowing that safety never arrived, that the pink moon illuminates continued struggle rather than eventual escape.
For audiences seeking documentaries that illuminate the contemporary migration experience through intimate, artistic lens, this film rewards investment. A Fox Under the Pink Moon transforms personal trauma into universal statement, proving that creative expression remains possible—and vital—even in circumstances designed to extinguish all such possibility.
