The story behind this year's festival campaign

Since 2022, IDFA has invited artists from its community to develop the festival’s visual campaign, offering their personal interpretation of IDFA and exploring the relationship between art, documentary and the world around us. For the 2026 edition, this artistic dialogue continues with director Mehrdad Oskouei and co-director Soraya Akhlaghi of A Fox Under a Pink Moon, winner of the IDFA Award for Best Film in the International Competition of 2025. Their collaboration extends the conversation that began with the film, in which Soraya’s drawings became a way of navigating memory, displacement and conflict.  

At the heart of this year’s campaign is a visual transformation. The trailer brings together fragments from documentaries previously screened at IDFA: images that bear witness to destruction, migration and the lasting impact of conflict. But these images do not remain unchanged. Soraya draws directly onto them, transforming scenes of violence and devastation through her own visual language. Her illustrations do not attempt to conceal or erase reality. Instead, they respond to it, creating space for another way of looking. 

An image of destruction can give rise to an unexpected gesture of beauty. Through drawing and animation, documentary images become canvases for imagination, connecting memory and the present, destruction and hope. This approach echoes a central idea in A Fox Under a Pink Moon: that art can reshape our relationship to the world without denying its realities. Soraya’s work acknowledges violence and suffering while insisting that beauty, tenderness and hope can exist alongside them. 

A campaign made across borders 
The making of the campaign itself reflects the realities at its heart. It became a patchwork of international collaborations, created across borders, time zones and vastly different circumstances. 

Soraya worked on the campaign from the refugee accommodation where she currently lives in Berlin, while Mehrdad coordinated the project from France. Composer Afshin Azizi created the score from the Netherlands, while editor Mohammad Babaee assembled the trailer from Iran. Soraya’s drawings were brought to life by Ukrainian animator Alina Milkina, working from Kyiv as the city continued to endure Russian bombardments. 

The campaign is therefore not simply a work about war, displacement and resilience – it is also shaped by these realities. Its creators bring their own experiences of migration, conflict and distance into the process. Together, they demonstrate the connections that art can create, even when physical borders make connection difficult. 

From war to hope 
Emotionally, the trailer moves through four interconnected states: war, devastation, migration and hope. Rather than presenting them as a linear journey, the campaign allows these experiences to overlap and coexist, reflecting the complexity of contemporary life. Documentary images become starting points for imagination. Drawings interrupt and transform them. Animation gives them movement and new meaning. The result is not an attempt to make difficult realities more palatable, but an invitation to look at them differently. 

In many ways, this reflects what IDFA strives to be. Documentary cinema confronts us with reality, while also creating a space in which images can be questioned, shared and transformed through dialogue. This year’s campaign embodies that belief. Art cannot undo violence, but it can change the way we look at it. And by changing how we look, it can help us imagine what might come next.