Ethnomatograph: “The Fox and the Pink Moon”

Ethnomatograf is Tuesday film screenings organized by the Ethnography Department, which introduce you to interesting, often unknown areas and issues of the modern world and different faces of man.

16-year-old artist Soraya Akhlaghi has been making a film for five years, recording key moments of her life with her mobile phone. She created gripping drawings and sculptures and for five years tried to escape Iran from her violent husband to her mother living in Austria. The director gives voice to Soraya, abandoning the traditional documentary structure in favor of a form based on images, gestures and symbols. Thanks to this, she is at the same time a heroine, a co-creator and a narrator of her own story. The recurring motifs of the fox and the pink moon—present in both the film sequences and Soraya's artwork—build a poetic language of the story in which fantasy and reality intersect, creating a space of escape and resistance.

The film, built from fragments of the heroine's personal archive and directed completely remotely, situates itself on the border of artistic cinema and autobiographical essay. It addresses issues of identity, migration and freedom, as well as the need for artistic expression as a form of survival. Art here becomes not only a tool for storytelling, but also a sign of freedom and escape, and a way of reclaiming agency and dignity.