‘Into the Jaws of the Ogre’ Director on Her Cannes ACID Doc About Displaced Iranian Siblings

Into the Jaws of the Ogre (Dans la gueule de l’ogre) is the title of the feature film debut from Iranian-French director Mahsa Karampour. Co-written with Maya Haffar, the documentary has a road movie feel and is about Karampour and her very different brother Siavash, their bond, their experiences in France and the U.S., respectively, and the experience of life of displaced and exiled people.

Into the Jaws of the Ogre takes audiences on a music-tinged cinematic journey between Iran and the United States, between past and present, including clandestinely shot footage from Iran. World premiering on Thursday, May 14 in the lineup of ACID, the Cannes Film Festival sidebar run by France’s association of film directors, viewers get to experience the siblings’ discussions, struggles, hopes and dreams.

“I can’t quite grasp the adventurous life of my brother Siavash, so far from my own,” the filmmaker explains in a synopsis for the film. “While I have just become French and he is about to become American, far from our native Iran, we are searching for common ground.”

ACID general delegate Pauline Ginot calls it “a film that makes us reflect on what happens to these young people from Tehran’s punk underground scene, once in exile. Through this story, familiar from The Yellow Dogs, the film explores another one, a more intimate one: the experience of exile – idealized, yet rarely acknowledged in the face of the hardships of exile.”

Indeed, Siavash was a member of Iranian indie rock band The Yellow Dogs that was featured in Bahman Ghobadi’s 2009 docu-drama film No One Knows About Persian Cats, which won the special jury prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section. Three members of the band and an associate were killed in a 2013 murder-suicide.

The film was produced by Mathilde Raczymow of Les films du Bilboquet, with support from the likes of France’s CNC and Institut Français. Rediance is handling international sales.

Before its world premiere, Karampour talked to THR about the long journey behind Into the Jaws of the Ogre, the displaced experience and how the U.S.-Iran war made its way into the film.

What was the inspiration for this film, your first feature as a writer-director?

In the mid-2000s, I had just arrived in France, and I very much wanted to keep a connection with Iranian society. I love France. I’ve learned cinema here, but the energy of creation in Iran was something else. So, I wanted to do my first film in Iran, and I wanted to tell our musical stories, because music has been something really important in my life. I played classical violin since the ’80s, and I have a bunch of stories about practicing music in a forbidden context, and I really wanted to tell them. And then there was this little brother that I loved so much, who was in Iran and was becoming a stranger to me. I wanted to reconnect with him. And it was his emerging musical activity that also became one of the first elements that made me want to start a film. I [shot] the very first footage in 2007 or 2008, and you see that in the film.

And then, your brother moved?

Yes. When he went to the United States, everything stopped. I went to Turkey and started filming other underground Iranian bands there, but I couldn’t find the same energy that I had with my brother there. And then the [killing] tragedy happened in 2013 after our father passed away in 2012. I felt like my world was vanishing. My friends left Iran, and I couldn’t hear the voices that I wanted to hear anymore. I felt we were a generation that wanted to reconstruct our country and wanted to have our voices heard. With all [that] vanishing, I had the huge anguish of being a passive spectator of a world that was disappearing. So I wanted to [set] an act against this disappearance.

My brother and his [music] group were known in Iran, and when they went to the United States, we didn’t hear about them anymore. So I wanted to film what happens to us after we leave our country, and I wanted to give a voice to so many talented people who went abroad. Many of them wanted to stay for two, three years and then go back to Iran, and they couldn’t because of political or financial problems.

So, I went to the United States, and I found my brother, who had become a kind of stranger to me. I wanted to know this guy who was really familiar and at the same time, very different from me. And the motivation for the film was to reconnect, find a meaningful [bond] between us and have our musical stories filmed and documented.

So, how long was this whole journey?

The process of the film took 18 years or so. I was not making the film all that time, and my material was not that much. I had 56 hours of footage. I started to work with my producer in 2018 or 2019, and we started to write the film. I’d say that 95 percent of my time was spent on writing, and when I started to edit the film, I rewrote it in the editing process. I started editing in 2023, and then we had to look for more money. It’s a very low-budget film, and it took a while.

I found the low-budget feel fits the underground music and filming we see in the film.

Thank you. It emerged layer by layer. It was something fragile, and there were so many ellipses, missing parts. I had to make the film with these missing parts, unspoken stuff and unfinished stuff. And I realized the film is about all these unfinished things – stories, songs, mourning – and the bond with my brother is an image, a theme, in the film that was very precious.

How did you think about telling personal versus universal stories?

My intention was to tell very personal stories, but touch people elsewhere. This is a very special Iranian story, which makes it different from [other countries], but this universal sister-brother story will feel familiar.

I also wanted to tell the story of normal things, such as music. Yes, we have had a government theocracy for 47 years, but people in Iran want to make music. I just wanted people to see a story at the same level, showing that we share the same codes. We all see images on the television that make us think that everybody in Iran is a supporter of the regime, before the mass insurrection. I wanted to talk about politics more indirectly. I felt that I could tell a very personal sister and brother story, and people can feel and understand the political context, such as the war, the propaganda, the songs, censorship and everything.

Into the Jaws of the Ogre features several scenes where you two go into “ruins” of different sorts, including one in Iran when you two were younger. I felt that this theme of ruins was a recurring symbol. Can you talk about that a bit?

These were the types of places in which my brother could find inspiration to write his songs. And during that period in Iran when rock music was forbidden, in these ruins in Tehran, they played forbidden concerts.

There is Persian mythology and mysticism in the film, and ruins in Persian poetry are very significant places. Actually, my brother uses the word all the time – “kharabat.” It’s something very difficult to explain in another language. It is a ruin that is fertile. It is a destroyed place in which you drink wine and connect to the divine. It is also a place in which you do controversial things. It is destroyed, and yet it is fertile, so it is a kind of connection to the past.

For me, “ruin” is also a symbol for this world in which we are living. This ruin of all the wars, Trump, Netanyahu and the ayatollahs, and all the stuff that we have in Europe, ecological problems, economic problems and young generations who have no hope. Everybody thinks that the Third World War will come, so this is a ruined world. But things are not hopeless.

There is a very timely scene in the film referencing the war in Iran…

I filmed that very last scene last summer. We had the very first episode of war in June. It was a very violent experience for me, personally. I went to Armenia and got our mother there, and we came to France. And then my brother came from the United States, and the family got together on this island in France. We wanted the family to be together. And I thought that this war was not finished.

I filmed my brother swimming. I wanted to film him swimming in the Persian Gulf, but he can not do that. But we have the Mediterranean Sea here in France. We don’t need to be in a specific geography to tell our stories. I felt he should keep swimming, and we can play music together to bond. We have made a film together. And if we can tell our little stories, it’s our way of resisting, and it’s our way of keeping the Iranian story alive.