THE FUSE

Again and again, teenage Afghan refugee Soraya Akhalaghi refers to herself and her fellow displaced migrants as “playing a game.” Only some way into “A Fox Under a Pink Moon” — a candid and urgent documentary about her years-long struggle to enter Europe — do we learn what she actually means by that phrase. The “game” is chancing an attempt to cross the border, and it’s one that’s largely rigged against them, as Iranian docmaker Mehrdad Oskouei‘s short, gripping film watches Soraya lose several rounds before making some substantial life changes. Her mordantly whimsical euphemism is apt in a film that repeatedly presents imagination as a survival tactic: A gifted young artist, Soraya expresses her struggle through darkly fantastical drawings and sculptures. Put in her own words, she “paints her pains.”