TEHRAN – The official campaign trailer for the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2026 has been made by an Iranian team.

Following the success of the film “A Fox Under a Pink Moon” co-directed by Mehrdad Oskouei and Soraya Akhlaghi at IDFA 2025, its makers were invited to create this year’s festival campaign trailer, ISNA reported.

In the making of the trailer, the filmmakers are accompanied by editor Mohammad Babaee and composer Afshin Azizi.

“From our first conversations with the IDFA team, we shared a vision of creating something beyond a festival trailer — a piece reflecting the urgent concerns of our time: peace, women, children, and hope for a better future,” Azizi wrote in a post on social media.

“At a time when war and violence continue to affect millions of lives around the world, we wanted to create something that speaks of humanity, compassion, and hope through images, animation, music, and sound,” he added. “Collaborating with IDFA, a festival we have always considered a home for documentary filmmakers worldwide, has been a truly special experience”.

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. 

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.

A joint production of Iran, France, the UK, Denmark, and the US, the 76-minute documentary had its world premiere at the festival and won its first international award.

The movie shows 16-year-old Soraya, who is already creating stunning drawings and sculptures that are as beautiful as they are dark. This strong-willed Afghan sculptor and illustrator has been trying for five years to leave Iran and join her mother in Austria.

At the heart of this year’s festival 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 on 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. 

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. 

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. 

According to the IDFA website, 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.

IDFA is a leading international documentary institute that provides a space for exchange, collaboration, and inspiration—bringing together filmmakers, artists, audiences, and professionals from around the world. 

Its broad scope includes a public festival of films and new media, funding initiatives, markets, talent development, and education programs—alongside a year-round documentary hub in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark.

SS/SAB