Mehrdad Oskouei and Soraya Akhlaghi’s documentary, A Fox Under a Pink Moon, begins from conditions of extreme instability. Soraya Akhlaghi, a young Afghan refugee living in Iran, moves through a world shaped by precarity, violence, and the long afterlife of displacement. Her mother emigrated to Austria when she was still a child, and the film follows her repeated attempts to reach Europe, passing through Turkey, in the hope of finding her.
That outline alone would be enough for a harrowing documentary, but A Fox Under a Pink Moon is after something more complicated than ordeal. It is equally concerned with how a young woman tries to preserve an artistic self while living inside structures designed to wear that self down.
Soraya Akhlaghi wants to be a visual artist. That matters because it is one of the film’s organizing principles, not a biographical detail added for texture. She lives in harsh conditions, trapped in a forced and dysfunctional marriage, exposed to aggression at multiple levels of daily life. Yet the film keeps returning to the fact that she continues to imagine, draw, make, and project herself outward through images.
In that sense, A Fox Under a Pink Moon is not simply about suffering or even escape. It is about the struggle to maintain an inner world when the outer one offers almost no stable ground.
This is where the film’s formal design becomes crucial. Shot entirely on two cell phones and intercut with animated sequences, it does not try to smooth Akhlaghi’s life into a polished narrative of victimhood or resilience. The image’s roughness is part of the film’s meaning. The phone footage has a lived-in instability: cramped interiors, abrupt framings, textures that feel immediate rather than composed from a safe distance.
At times, that rawness is a strength, bringing the viewer close to Akhlaghi’s situation without the aesthetic buffer that more polished nonfiction often supplies. At other moments, the looseness risks flattening scenes that might have carried more force with sharper structuring. Yet even that unevenness feels tied to the film’s larger gamble. It would rather remain close to a precarious life than overorganize it into clarity.
The movement between direct recording and animation is even more important. The documentary seems to understand that certain experiences, especially those shaped by fear, memory, migration, and repeated violations, cannot be fully rendered through observational footage alone. They require another visual language, one closer to dream, allegory, and self-projection.
The animated passages are among A Fox Under a Pink Moon‘s strongest elements, especially because they emerge from Akhlaghi’s own symbolic vocabulary. As she describes it, there is a clown inside her, a fox, the moon, and demons.
These figures are suggestive without being overdetermined. The clown appears to point toward a damaged or estranged self-image, a figure of exposure, humiliation, and performance. The fox feels more protective, almost like a guardian self, alert and adaptive. The moon points toward transcendence, distance, or some other realm of imaginative survival. The demons are fear, memory, and internal threat.
What matters is not whether each symbol can be decoded neatly. It is that the film gives Soraya Akhlaghi access to a language of her own that is not reducible to testimony alone. Her interior life is not translated into sociological explanation. It remains strange, personal, and partly opaque.
Her visual art is framed throughout the documentary, making this even clearer. The artwork becomes part of the story’s unfolding, marking phases, moods, and thresholds in Akhlaghi’s experience. This gives the film a quality that many documentaries about forced migration lack. It does not treat imagination as secondary to crisis, as though art were a luxury that begins only after survival is secured. Here, imagination becomes one of the few available means of surviving a crisis at all. That is one of the film’s sharpest insights.
That choice also changes A Fox Under a Pink Moon‘s politics. There is, of course, a broader context of Afghan displacement, legal precarity in Iran, patriarchal violence, and the brutal logistics of border crossing. In that sense, the film clearly belongs to a larger body of work about migration and its violence.
However, because Akhlaghi is also a co-director and the material was recorded over five years, the documentary resists reducing her to a passive emblem of suffering. It remains attentive to authorship, however fragile that authorship may be. We are not simply watching a life being observed by others. We are watching a woman help construct the terms of her own appearance.
That may be where the film is most convincing. It does not sentimentalize endurance, nor does it prettify trauma. At the same time, it refuses to imagine survival in purely administrative or geographical terms. Escape is not only a matter of reaching Europe, but a question of whether Soraya Akhlaghi can keep alive the parts of herself that violence, exile, and coercion keep trying to flatten.
The title already suggests that doubleness: the fox as a creature of survival and cunning, the pink moon as something stranger, softer, and less reducible to fact. Together, they name a world in which fear and imagination remain inseparable.
If the film has a limitation, it lies in how closely it commits itself to Akhlaghi’s inner register. That intimacy is the source of its force, but it can also narrow the frame. There are moments when one wants a little more resistance around the circumstances shaping her life, a fuller sense of the external pressures against which this interior world is being formed.
Still, that narrowness may be the cost of the film’s most valuable achievement. It stays with Aakhlaghi not as a case, but as a consciousness.
If A Fox Under a Pink Moon lingers, it is because it understands that displacement is not only territorial. It is psychic, aesthetic, and intimate. Soraya Akhlaghi is displaced from home, from safety, from her mother, but also from any stable version of adulthood or selfhood.
What the film offers is not resolution. It offers access to the forms, images, and fragile acts of creation through which Akhlaghi continues to exist inside that fracture. That is what makes it more than a document of suffering. It becomes a record of selfhood; she tries to survive under siege.