Soraya Akalagi, a teenage Afghan refugee, has repeatedly referred to herself and her fellow displaced migrants as “playing a game.” It’s not until “The Fox Under the Pink Moon,” a candid and urgent documentary about her years-long struggle to enter Europe, gets a little further along that we discover what she actually means by that phrase. The “game” is an attempt to cross borders, and the short, charming film, directed by Iranian doctor Mehrdad Oskouei, sees Soraya lose several rounds before making major changes in her life, most of which are set against them. Her modern, whimsical euphemisms are a perfect fit for a film that repeatedly presents imagination as a survival strategy. A talented young artist, Soraya expresses her struggles through dark and fantastical paintings and sculptures. In her own words, she is “painting her own suffering.”
As a portrait of a young woman constrained by cultural patriarchy and dire social conditions, The Fox Under the Pink Moon feels like a natural follow-up to Oskowei’s previous two feature-length documentaries. 2016’s “Starless Dreams” and 2019’s “Sunless Shadows,” twin portraits of female inmates at a juvenile correctional facility in Tehran, both received praise on the festival circuit and were distributed nationally by The Cinema. guild. “Fox Under the Pink Moon” should perform at least as well, given the increased attention it received from winning the top prize in IDFA’s international competition, as well as its eye-catching mixed-media component, with a number of striking animated sequences based directly on Soraya’s own artwork.
Oskoei’s latest film differs from her previous work in the direct nature of the female perspective, as indicated by the subject’s co-director credits. All of the live-action footage here was shot over five years by Soraya (who is credited only by name) using a cell phone camera and assembled remotely by the director. It’s a perspective we haven’t seen much of in the recent plethora of recent documentation of the immigration crisis, and even if Soraya herself isn’t all that compelling, its immediate qualities will make The Fox stand out. A determined, stoic and resilient young woman with a talent for articulating both her personal predicaments and the larger political crisis surrounding her, using language that alternates between visceral and poetic. The fact that she is only 17 years old at the beginning of the film is a belated but surprising fact.
It turns out that Soraya has spent most of her life in Tehran, more or less between where she was born and where she wanted to be. Her Afghan parents emigrated before she was born, but it never felt like home to her. That’s mainly because she has lived there for a long time without any close relatives. Her father died when she was young, and her mother safely fled to Austria a few years later, after which she was raised by an abusive uncle. “I’m used to being beaten,” she says in heartbreaking sangroid in one of her many self-portrait confessionals. She is currently married to Ali. Ali is a volatile older man, and the tense, wince-inducing footage shows him picking up where his uncle left off.
But we first met Soraya in Istanbul’s Zeytun Brna refugee dormitory in 2019. It was in this modest shelter that she, Ali, and many other Iranian fugitives made the first of several attempts to cross the Turkish border into Greece. Interfering with the authorities, they were sent back to Tehran, where she had to wait out the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. While making a living as a cleaner for a wealthy Iranian family, he vents his frustrations through highly resourceful and creative art, from sculpting sharply masculine “demons” out of soaked household cardboard to creating fairy-tale-style visions featuring recurring characters of a beleaguered clown and his fox sidekick.
Both characters are woven into the film’s beautiful watercolor-style animated interludes designed by Mohammad Lotfari, with the clown sometimes being Soraya’s own alter ego and sometimes a heartbreaking stand-in for other ailing and persecuted people. Among them is Nazar Mohammad, also known as Kasha, an Afghan comedian who was killed by the Taliban for his subversive artistry.
Animation is not just decorative; it serves as a bright extension of the subject’s vivid and unique worldview. Soraya is a strong enough presence to announce herself without any outside context, but the movie could never go wrong with a little more scene-setting. Closing title cards bring her story to a satisfying end, but we directly miss those developments. Perhaps, as Soraya enters a new, freer phase in her life, her need for the camera decreases and her need for the canvas increases.
