Matthew Rankin’s surrealist comedy about the Canadian city of Winnipeg, where local mixes with Iranian tradition.
Snowy Winnipeg looks like provincial Canada and the Tehran of the 1980s and 1990s at the same time. The road signs are in Persian, vendors are selling old typewriters at a street market, chickens walk in the fresh snow, and a popular café chain serves tea and Iranian sweets. A group of confused tourists moves between unimpressive sights. Meanwhile, a man named Matthew Rankin (played by the director, but not sharing his biography or his character), a former Quebec government worker, returns to Winnipeg to find his childhood home.
In Universal Language, reality is interwoven with invention, inspired by other famous films to create a cinephile landscape. The first shot featuring the sign for the invented Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults brings to mind the famous Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and the Iranian institution of a similar name that helped him film Where Is the Friend’s House? Along with the poetic realism of Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, Rankin pays tribute to the aesthetics of the Canadian postmodernist director Guy Maddin and the realism of contemporary filmmakers from Quebec and mentions dozens of other creators who inspired the making of Universal Language. The language of his film aspires to universality and can become, according to Rankin, a sign system that connects people of all backgrounds.
Universal Language premiered in the Directors' Fortnight program at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, where it received the Audience Award, and has also brought Rankin awards in Toronto, Vienna, and Thessaloniki.
The film will be screened in Persian and French with Russian subtitles.
Universal Language
Director: Matthew Rankin
Canada, 2024. 89 min.
18+