Best Film Award winner Mehrdad Oskouei on A Fox Under a Pink Moon
"An empowering collaboration between an established filmmaker and a young new artist": this is how the jury describes the film that won the IDFA Award for Best Film in IDFA's International Competition 2025. In A Fox Under a Pink Moon, we follow the strong-willed 16-year-old artist Soraya, an Afghan girl who has spent years trying to flee Iran for Europe, to reunite with her mother, filming the long journey and her hardships on her mobile phone. Along the way, she channels all her fears, worries, and the domestic abuse she endures in a violent marriage into deeply expressive and powerful works of art. We met with director Mehrdad Oskouei and his co-director and protagonist Soraya at ITA during IDFA. Read our conversation below.
Soraya, you call Mehrdad "uncle" in the film, but you're not blood relatives. How did your collaboration come about?
Soraya: “I took a sculpture workshop with a well-known sculptor. That sculptor would sell my works as his own. Mehrdad was working on a film about him; he was in the research phase of his project. We met in the studio.”
Mehrdad: “I noticed a girl who was withdrawn and made beautiful work.”
Soraya: “In that class, I used all kinds of leftover materials to paint on. Mehrdad once brought me a stack of A4 sheets and colored pencils. He asked me to draw something that came from my heart. He then bought that work from me. I was overwhelmed. In my eyes, it was something any two-year-old could have drawn.”
Mehrdad: “Soraya pointed out the works in the studio that were hers. I couldn't believe it. So, I asked the sculptor, and he admitted that they were indeed Soraya's. I quickly abandoned my idea of making a film about that sculptor.”
Mehrdad discovered that Soraya was trying to flee Iran illegally and asked her to start documenting her life, filming all the footage herself. Soraya took several filmmaking courses beforehand, and that's reflected in A Fox Under a Pink Moon. Mehrdad, who directed the film entirely remotely, reflects: “My director of photography and I would occasionally see shots of Soraya that made us think, ‘We could never have imagined this.’ She's truly talented.”
Does this way of working mark a shift in your approach as a documentary filmmaker?
Mehrad: “My previous films were classical films, where you as a director are on site with your crew, pointing the camera at a subject. For the first time, I knew that I couldn’t be everywhere with her, so for this film, I completely handed over the camera. And I'm also doing that partly for a new film I'm currently working on, Still Staring at the Sun, about a blind boy who dreams of climbing Mount Everest.”
Yet, Mehrdad was already experimenting with handing the camera over to his protagonists for A Fox Under a Pink Moon. In Sunless Shadows (which won the IDFA Award for Best Directing in 2019), for which he filmed young female inmates in a juvenile detention center in Iran, he sometimes left his protagonists alone with his camera. They then used it to address their victims or accomplices. What is new in A Fox Under a Pink Moon is the animation, including a fox that accompanies Soraya at times.
Why a fox? Soraya explains: “The fox actually is an animal that I love because it’s gentle, caring, and beautiful, and they can take care of themselves. They don’t need anyone. And they’re really intelligent. I wanted to be a fox myself. I needed to be a fox in that moment.”
Mehrdad, what did you learn about yourself by making this film?
Mehrdad spoke with emotion: “Making this film, I understood that I knew nothing. It's a misconception that experienced filmmakers know exactly what they're doing. By transforming Soraya’s life and suffering into consciousness through the magical cinema that is documentary filmmaking, I understood that the filmmaker’s heartbeat is in sync with that of their protagonist.”
Soraya, what are you working on at the moment?
Soraya, asks Mehrdad, “Can I tell them? We’re working on a new film together. We already filmed the opening shot during IDFA, at the premiere of A Fox Under a Pink Moon.”
Mehrdad’s daughter Alma, who attended the entire conversation as a translator and also worked on the film, pulls out her phone: a selfie video of Soraya taking the stage at iconic Amsterdam cinema, Pathé Tuschinski, a loudly applauding audience behind her. The start to a story on her success? The filmmakers can’t provide any more details yet.
A Fox Under a Pink Moon will also be screened on Saturday November 22 and during the Best of IDFA Light and Best of IDFA: Award Winners.