'A fox under a pink moon': the life we suffer and the life we can imagine

How much delicacy, how much intelligence, how much beauty can there be in the head of a girl? Of a girl who for five years has been trying to survive the borders of Europe? Of a 16-year-old Afghan girl, fatherless, abandoned at 7 by her mother who moved to Austria, raised by an uncle who beat her, married at 14 to another man who hurt her? A fox under a pink moon, by Mehrdad Oskouei and Soraya Akhlaghi, the feature film that won the Grand Prix del Genève and the Youth Prize of the Geneva Human Rights Film Festival and Forum (Fifdh) is a rare and precious documentary, a documentary filmed with makeshift means, capable of harmoniously interweaving raw footage stolen from the desperation of 'clandestines' with the richness of an uncommon artistic imagination. Of transforming into paintings, sculptures, animations, as sad as they are enveloping, the luxuriant imagination that can unfold despite a life of pain and deprivation. A film that poetically compares what we are forced to be with what we could be.

Soraya Akhlaghi, a young 16-year-old artist, born in Iran but of Afghan origin, meets Iranian filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei in the sculpture workshop where she is an apprentice, who has come to meet her master. Impressed by the beauty of her drawings, Oskouei decides to make a film about her life. He alerts his troupe who lives in Iran: he will use the videos she records with her mobile phone and send them to him via telegram or in other ways. He will receive almost half a thousand of them. This is not shown in the film, Oskouei tells Sole 24 Ore on the sidelines of the Geneva screening at which two griefly remembered their family members and friends who are under the bombs of Trump and Netanyahu.

A fox under a pink moon, in fact, opens next, with Soraya sending a video of herself to 'Uncle Mehrdad': it is 2019, he is in Turkey, she promises to send him more footage. We then find her in a basement where many huddled families are waiting to leave for a game, which in slang means they will try to cross the border illegally. The next scenes are dramatic: so many people standing huddled in a dark space shuddering, whilesome desperate people shout several times that they are crushing their children. The van stops, they have been intercepted by the police, they abandon them on the road, at night, in the cold.

The attempts follow one another, the viewer thinks that what he is seeing is a rare first-hand account of the journey to Europe that so many undertake and so few complete. Only, gradually,reality is superimposed on fantasy, another world comes to life: the crude images of life on the margins are interspersed with drawings, the drawings that Soraya makes on the floor in the basement or when she returns home, between one attempt and another, to Iran, where her husband works as a caretaker and she as a cleaner. Evocative drawings of a sad clown with a universe swirling around him, a clown representing her and all women who have to show themselves happy even if their husbands beat them, on pain of being beaten harder and rejected by society, of a beautiful fox her friend, of a pink moon. Soraya enters the bathroom, we hear terrible screams coming from afar, we realise that her face is swollen, a large bruise on her arm, we realise that the screams are her own, previous, she must have left the tape recorder on when her husband was beating her.

We see Soraya in a dark garage breaking egg boxes and with them making papier-mâché sculptures of bearded men, perhaps the men who subjugated her home country. They set off again, another game, another attempt. The traffickers leave them in a hilly, remote area, they have to cross the border on foot. But only the shaved backs of the hills are visible. They find ruins, they sleep there for days. Soraya collects the mud and sticks it to the walls, gives it the shape of small grotesque faces that watch those stubborn travellers. Her skin fills with bubbles, they are the bedbugs. The film thus continues on two parallel tracks showing the reality the girl lives and the one she can imagine. Five years pass in this way, five years of trial and error, five years in which Soraya builds and shares a wealthy and cosy world where one can take refuge when everything around collapses.