Soraya Akhlaghi was 16 when she started filming herself on a smartphone at an Istanbul asylum centre. She was fleeing Tehran, where she worked as a maid. Her mother had already made it to Austria after Soraya's father died when she was a child. Soraya was trying to follow. The film we have — assembled remotely by co-director Mehrdad Oskouei — is what five years of that journey looks like from the inside. The mechanics of the border crossing world are laid out without sentimentality. Attempts are called 'games' — a euphemism for sorties with people-smugglers that mostly end in failure, in hostile wilderness, at the hands of hostile law enforcement. Soraya ends up back in Tehran, married to a violent husband. She watches the Taliban take Kabul on TV — she is of Afghan heritage — and the film lets that moment sit without explaining it. She plans the next attempt. She gets beaten. The Turkish border police are waiting again. What separates this from the standard refugee documentary is art — specifically Soraya's art. She draws obsessively: a moon she addresses her longing to, a fox who gives her counsel, a clown who stands in for her inner resilience, craggy demons she also sculpts into physical objects. These four figures recur across the film with the consistency of a private mythology. Oskouei's contribution is to let them breathe — the drawings animate into vaporous sequences that give the film a visual register unavailable to straight documentary. Soraya's eye behind the camera is worth noting explicitly. Filming herself in overloaded trucks and sinking dinghies, she composes chaotic migrant situations with something close to purposeful clarity. This is not accidental. The same visual intelligence that generates the fox and the moon is shaping every frame. The film's review in the Guardian notes, with real generosity, that there is hopefully a cinematographer shortage wherever she ends up. The film does not resolve. Soraya's sisyphean loop — start, fail, return, start again — is the structure, and the film respects it enough not to impose a tidy arc. The other refugees here matter too: a group of children stranded in a forest build a 'mouse house' from twigs and leaves. The film understands this as the same impulse as Soraya's drawings. Art, here, is not therapy or self-expression in the Instagram sense — it is the first act of staking out territory, of insisting that where you are is not all you are.
