‘A Fox Under a Pink Moon’ Review: A Teenage Bride Documents Her Escape from Iran in Expressive IDFA Winner

Again and again, teenage Afghan refugee Soraya Akhalaghi refers to herself and her fellow displaced migrants as “playing a game.” Only some way into “A Fox Under a Pink Moon” — a candid and urgent documentary about her years-long struggle to enter Europe — do we learn what she actually means by that phrase. The “game” is chancing an attempt to cross the border, and it’s one that’s largely rigged against them, as Iranian docmaker Mehrdad Oskouei‘s short, gripping film watches Soraya lose several rounds before making some substantial life changes. Her mordantly whimsical euphemism is apt in a film that repeatedly presents imagination as a survival tactic: A gifted young artist, Soraya expresses her struggle through darkly fantastical drawings and sculptures. Put in her own words, she “paints her pains.”

As a portrait of young womanhood restricted by cultural patriarchy and dire social circumstance, “A Fox Under a Pink Moon” feels a natural follow-up to Oskouei’s last two feature docs: 2016’s “Starless Dreams” and 2019’s “Sunless Shadows,” twin portraits of female inmates at a Tehran juvenile correctional facility that were both celebrated on the festival circuit and distributed Stateside by The Cinema Guild. “A Fox Under a Pink Moon” should perform at least as well, given the profile boost of the top prize in IDFA‘s international competition, plus an eye-catching mixed-media component: a number of strikingly animated sequences based directly on Soraya’s own artwork.

Oskouei’s latest differs from his previous films in the direct nature of its female perspective, as indicated by its subject’s co-directing credit: All the live-action footage here has been shot by Soraya (credited only by her first name) with cellphone cameras over a period of five years, and assembled remotely by the helmer. It’s a point of view we haven’t much seen across the surfeit of recent docs concerned with the migrant crisis, and that first-hand quality would make “A Fox Under a Pink Moon” stand out even if Soraya herself weren’t such a compelling figure: a determinedly stoic and resilient young woman with a gift for articulating both her personal plight and the larger political crisis surrounding her, in alternately visceral and poetic terms. That she’s only 17 years old at the film’s outset is a delayed and startling reveal.

Soraya, we learn, has spent more or less her entire life stranded between where she’s from and where she wants to be — mostly in Tehran, where her Afghan parents moved before she was born, but which has never felt like home to her. That’s in large part because she’s lived there a long time without close family: Her father died when she was a young girl, her mother successfully fled to Austria a few years later, and she was subsequently raised by an abusive uncle. “I am used to being beaten,” she says with heartbreaking sangfroid in one of her many selfie confessionals: She’s now married to Ali, a volatile older man who, as we learn via fraught, wince-inducing footage, has picked up where her uncle left off.

We first encounter Soraya, however, in Istanbul’s Zeytun Burna refugee dormitory in 2019, a spartan shelter from which she, Ali and a number of other Iranian escapees make the first of several documented attempts to cross the Turkish border into Greece. Foiled by the authorities, they’re sent back to Tehran, where she’s forced to wait out the first year of the Covid pandemic — eking out a living as a cleaner for wealthy Iranian households, and channeling her frustration through highly resourceful, creative artistry, whether sculpting pointedly masculine “demons” from sodden household cardboard, or drawing fairytale-style visions in which recurring figures include a beleaguered clown and a companionable fox.

Both characters are woven through the film’s lovely, watercolor-style animated interludes, designed by Mohammad Lotfali, with the clown sometimes Soraya’s own alter ego and sometimes a mournful stand-in for other ailing and persecuted individuals — among them Nazar Mohammad, popularly known as Khasha, an Afghan comedian killed by the Taliban for his subversive artistry.

Not merely decorative, the animations serve as an illuminating expansion of the subject’s vivid and distinctive worldview. Soraya is a strong enough presence to announce herself without much external context, though a little more scene-setting wouldn’t go amiss in the film — and while closing title cards bring her story to a rewarding close, we miss those developments first-hand. Perhaps, as she enters a new, more liberated stage of life, Soraya has less need for the camera, and more for the canvas.