THE STORY – Soraya, a 16-year-old Afghan artist, spent five years trying to flee Iran to reach Austria. During this time, she filmed herself, documenting her escape attempts, her abusive marriage, and her drawings and sculptures that express her struggle. Some of her drawings appear in the film, including a fox that accompanies her on her journey and a pink moon that constantly watches over her.
THE CAST – Soraya Akhalaghi
THE TEAM – Soraya Akhalaghi (Director), Mehrdad Oskouei (Director/Writer), Amir Adibparvar & Siavash Jamali (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 76 Minutes
Some films get made under such harsh, restrictive conditions that their mere existence seems miraculous. “A Fox Under A Pink Moon” is one of those films. Soraya Akhalaghi’s harrowingly intimate self-filmed documentary has plenty of power as it is, but learn even a bit about the story behind how the film got made, and it becomes even more impressive: Soraya filmed herself on two Galaxy phones in Iran and Turkey when she was 15-19 years old as she and her husband, Ali, were trying to escape to Greece. The teenage artist sent footage back and forth with established documentary filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei (“Starless Dreams”), who discovered her as an artist’s apprentice and was taken with not only her striking sculptures but also her personality and story. Born in Iran to Afghani parents, Soraya is essentially stateless, unable to legally travel to Afghanistan to get the ID she needs to get the passport that would allow her to travel (ideally to Austria to meet her mother, who left Soraya and her father eight years ago at the start of the film). When her father passed away not long after, Soraya was sent to her uncle, where she quickly learned how to take a beating. He married her off at fourteen because he couldn’t take care of her any longer. The beatings continued. The film doesn’t spell all of this out, though (Soraya’s first mention of her husband is so out of left field that you’d be forgiven for wondering if she was joking), building Soraya’s world from the inside out and slowly revealing the full truth of her plight. Hers is a heartrending tale of the human spirit’s triumph in the darkest places imaginable, a testament to art’s power to save us when nothing else can.
The film opens with a brief introduction to Soraya and her art, with an animated fox appearing behind her as she sits in front of a camera explaining how difficult communication is and what life is like as they wait for word from the traffickers bringing her and 40 other people over the border to Greece. The next scene plunges you into hell: Everyone has been crammed into one van, at that point for over six hours. Soraya’s camera shows us just how tightly packed they are, and when a woman cries out to please not trample her baby, it’s as unsurprising as it is horrifying. At one point, their drivers run away, leaving the group of refugees stranded with no knowledge of where they are or what’s happening. They end up having to find taxis back to where they had been living in Istanbul, with only months left before the country becomes too cold to survive and forces them back to Iran. There have been many films about the experience of refugees escaping their oppressive homelands and sneaking across borders in harrowing conditions, but none with the immediacy of Soraya’s footage. Her need to hide her filming from those around her, so as not to jeopardize their illegal crossing, lends these sections of the film an authentic sense of danger that puts you fully into Soraya’s shoes. The desolate landscapes, cramped quarters, and chaotic commotion, even in short spurts, paint an unsparing portrait of a refugee’s journey.
The film doesn’t present all this terrifying footage without a release valve, as Soraya lets us into her artistic world, which gives her a vital escape. She makes art in her free time, which she has plenty of, and the film uses her artwork to immerse us more fully in her headspace. Her paintings become animated sequences that introduce her most recurring themes, namely clowns. In the first of these sequences, she imagines a clown holding everyone in its arms like a life raft, protecting them as they cross the sea to Thessaloniki. She sees clowns as strong, with their incredibly physical abilities and undying smiles. Soraya has the mark of a true artist, using whatever materials she has to create; she sculpts the “demon sculptures” that represent her fears; for example, she sculpts out of a mix of water and egg cartons.
The film is art for her, too, and you can feel Soraya’s affinity for the form grow as time passes. The lighting and framing become more striking, and she becomes bolder with what she films and when. Honest to a fault, Soraya shows no shame in putting the bruises from Ali’s beatings on camera, staring down the lens and daring the audience to look away from what the world has forced her into. Between the beatings, the squalid living conditions, and the never-ending, agonizing attempts at border crossing, one can hardly blame her, but her art seemingly always saves her, giving her an outlet to process her trauma and a way to envision a future for herself. Against all odds, it gives her hope and the strength she needs to survive.
To keep her storytelling as simple and minimalist as possible, Soraya and Oskouei gloss over details that would provide important context for her living situation, making the film a bit difficult to follow, especially for Western audiences. Soraya herself is so open and honest, though, that you feel for her all the way through. As she becomes more comfortable on camera and gains maturity with each passing year, she opens up more about her past and what she wants for her future. The animated fox constantly reminds us that, despite her maturity, Soraya is still incredibly young. She’s shaped by the world around her, though, in ways that make her youth impossible to reconcile with her circumstances. At one point, she hacks her hair off and then films herself joyously dancing in traditional dress. We don’t know exactly why she decided to do so, but it’s clear she now feels free in a way she didn’t before. In the very next scene, she shows her worst bruises yet. She actively wonders why she feels so connected to her home country of Afghanistan, which she watches come under the rule of the Taliban, when she has never been there. Many people feel this way about their birth country, but hearing it directly from someone so young paints that feeling in a light that feels impossible to shake. Here is a child who knows next to nothing about the world, who has been beaten down by it at every turn, and who still somehow manages to find joy and keep pushing for a better life. There’s nothing more inspirational.
And yet, there’s also nothing more horrifying. What Soraya captures, and how she captures it, is just as important to her story as the art she shares. The film’s restraint in fully exploring Soraya’s dire circumstances makes the horrors she shows feel even more harrowing. It’s hard to imagine living through so many failed trips across the border, but hundreds of people around the world do, and this film comes as close as possible to making you feel the anguish and pain that comes with it. With Soraya’s vividly expressive paintings and sculptures, “A Fox Under A Pink Moon” fully puts you in its subject’s shoes and forces you to live in them. In just under 80 minutes, it makes you feel more than most films do in two hours, but it’s never too much. The images linger: Dozens of refugees hiding from the vicious winds under sheets that make them look like corpses dotting the landscape, a line of people trying to escape in a snowstorm, a broken guitar after a seventeen-year-old girl excitedly puts on lipstick for the first time. These images carry a raw power that doesn’t need explanation. For someone so young to have to go through this is terrible. That she can make such bold, uncompromising, hopeful art from her experience is remarkable.
