By John Corrado
The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto
Soraya, the young subject at the centre of A Fox Under a Pink Moon, is an Afghan teen girl living in Iran, who is trying to flee across the Turkish border so she can make her way to be with her mother in Austria.
The complexity of her situation is captured in this short but stirring documentary, which packs a lot in to just 77 minutes. The film mostly unfolds through cellphone footage shot by Soraya herself over the course of five years. This footage was sent to Iranian filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei, who assembles it together into a compelling feature.
Despite her young age, Soraya lives with an older, abusive husband, who beats her. The depicted and implied domestic violence adds another disturbing layer to the film. Equally harrowing is the clandestinely shot footage that Soraya captures of her family’s various failed attempts at “playing a game,” which is code for trying to illegally cross the border.
To cope with all of it, and help herself process, Soraya draws and sculpts characters from her own imagination; a sad clown girl, a helpful orange fox, who live under a pink moon in the sky, giving the film its lyrical title. In wonderful cinematic flourishes, Oskouei animates these often surrealistic drawings, with the fox appearing beside Soraya. What shines through the film is her resilience, using her art as a survival method.
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