In the jaws of the ghoul (In the game Ghoul) is the title of the first feature film by Iranian-French director Mahsa Karampour. The documentary, co-written with Maya Haffar, has the feel of a road movie and revolves around Karampur and her very different brother Siavash, their relationship, their experiences in France and the United States, respectively, and the experience of life as displaced persons and exiles.
In the jaws of the ghoul It takes viewers on a cinematic, music-tinged journey between Iran and the United States, between the past and the present, including footage secretly filmed from Iran. It will have its world premiere on Thursday, May 14 at the ACID lineup, the Cannes Film Festival sidebar run by the French Film Directors Association, and viewers will be able to experience the siblings’ discussions, struggles, hopes and dreams.
“I cannot fully understand my brother Siavash’s adventurous life, apart from my own,” the director explains in the film’s synopsis. “While I have just become French and he is about to become American, far from our homeland, Iran, we are looking for common ground.”
ACID General Delegate Pauline Jeannot describes it as “a film that makes us think about what happens to these young people from the underground punk scene in Tehran, once in exile. Through this familiar story from The Yellow Dogs, the film explores another story, a more intimate experience: the experience of exile – idealized, but rarely acknowledged in the face of the hardships of exile.”
In fact, Siavash was a member of the Iranian indie rock band The Yellow Dogs, which appeared in director Bahman Ghobadi’s 2009 docudrama. No one knows about Persian catsWhich won the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. Three band members and one of their bandmates were killed in a 2013 murder-suicide.
The film is produced by Mathilde Raccimo of Les Films du Bilboquet, with support from institutions such as the French CNC and the French Institute. Rediance handles international sales.
Ahead of the world premiere, Karampur spoke to THR About the long journey behind In the jaws of the ghoulThe experience of the displaced and how the American-Iranian war made its way into the film.
What was the inspiration for this film, your first feature film as a writer and director?
In the mid-2000s, I had just arrived in France, and I desperately wanted to maintain contact with the Iranian community. I love France. I learned cinema here, but the creative energy in Iran was something else. So, I wanted to make my first film in Iran, and I wanted to tell our musical stories, because music was a really important thing in my life. I’ve played classical violin since the 1980s, and I have a bunch of stories about practicing music in a taboo context, and I really wanted to tell them. Then there was this little brother whom I loved so much, who was in Iran and had become a stranger to me. I wanted to reconnect with him. His budding music business was also one of the first elements that made me want to start a film. I [shot] The first footage was 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 Türkiye and started photographing other Iranian bands there, but I did not find the same energy that I had with my brother there. And then [killing] Tragedy happened in 2013 after our father died in 2012. I felt like my world was disappearing. My friends left Iran, and I couldn’t hear the voices I wanted to hear anymore. I felt that we were a generation that wanted to rebuild our country and wanted its voice to be heard. With everyone [that] After the vanishing, I had great pain of being a passive spectator of a world that was disappearing. So I wanted to [set] Action against this disappearance.
My brother and him [music] This group was well known in Iran, and when they went to the United States, we no longer heard about them. So I wanted to capture what happens to us after we leave our country, and I wanted to give a voice to the many talented people who have gone abroad. Many of them wanted to stay for two or three years and then return to Iran, but they were unable to do so due to political or financial problems.
So, I went to the United States, and found my brother, who had become a stranger to me. I wanted to know this man who was so familiar and at the same time so different from me. The motivation behind the film was to reconnect and find meaning [bond] Between us, photographing and documenting our musical stories.
So, how long was this entire trip?
The film process took 18 years or so. I hadn’t been making the film all that time, and the material I was using wasn’t much. I had 56 hours of footage. I started working with my producer in 2018 or 2019, and we started writing the movie. I would say 95% of my time was spent writing, and when I started editing the film, I rewrote it during 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 some time to make.
I found the low budget feel to suit the discreet music and photography we see in the film.
Thank you. It appeared layer after layer. It was a fragile thing, and there were a lot of missing pieces, missing parts. I had to make the film with these missing parts, unspoken things and incomplete things. And I realized that the movie was about all these unfinished things — the stories and the songs and the mourning — and that the connection to my brother as an image and a theme in the movie was so precious.
How did you think about telling personal versus universal stories?
My intention was to tell very personal stories, but touch people in other places. This is a very special Iranian story, which makes it different from… [other countries]but this universal story between brother and sister will feel familiar.
I also wanted to tell the story of ordinary things, like music. Yes, we have had a theocracy government for 47 years, but people in Iran want to make music. I just wanted people to see a story on the same level, showing that we share the same symbols. We all see images on television that make us believe that everyone in Iran is pro-regime, before the mass uprising. I wanted to talk about politics indirectly. I felt like I could tell a very personal story between a sister and a brother, and people could feel and understand the political context, like the war, the propaganda, the songs, the censorship, everything.
In the jaws of the ghoul It features several scenes where the two of you go to “ruins” of different types, including a scene in Iran when you were younger. I felt like the theme of monuments was a recurring symbol. Can you talk about that a little bit?
These were the kinds of places where my brother could find inspiration to write his songs. During that period in Iran when rock music was banned, in these monuments in Tehran, they held banned concerts.
There are Persian mythology and mystics in the film, and the monuments in Persian poetry are very important places. In fact, my brother uses the word all the time – “ruins.” It is something that is difficult to explain in another language. It is a fertile desolation. It is a destructive place where you drink wine and connect with God. It’s also a place where you do controversial things. It is destructive, and yet fertile, so it is a kind of connection to the past.
For me, “ruin” is also a symbol of this world in which we live. This devastation of all the wars, Trump, Netanyahu, the Ayatollahs, all the things we have in Europe, the environmental problems, the economic problems, and the young generations who have no hope. Everyone thinks World War III is coming, so this is a devastated world. But things are not hopeless.
There is a very appropriate scene in the film that refers to the war in Iran…
I shot that last scene last summer. We witnessed the first episode of the war in June. It was a very violent experience for me personally. I went to Armenia and brought my mother there, and then we came to France. Then my brother came from the United States, and the family came together on this island in France. We wanted the family to be together. I thought this war was not over yet.
I filmed my brother swimming. I wanted to film him swimming in the Arabian Gulf, but he couldn’t do it. But I have a debt A Mediterranean here in France. We don’t need to be in a specific geographic area to tell our stories. I felt like he should keep swimming, and we could play music together to bond. We made a movie together. If we can tell our little stories, that is our way of resisting, and that is our way of keeping the Iranian story alive.
