Film Screening: Universal Language

Matthew Rankin, 2024, 89 min, Canada, Farsi & French w/ English subtitles, DCP

With deadpan, absurdist charm, Manitoban filmmaker Matthew Rankin triangulates a group of interconnected storylines set in a wintry, bleakly beautiful Winnipeg. Two kids discover a bank note frozen in a block of ice, which they hope to retrieve to buy their classmates a new pair of glasses. A tour guide brings befuddled visitors on a walking tour of the city’s modest environs. A melancholy man (Rankin, in an autobiographical role) returns home from Montreal to reunite with his family after many years. Reimagining Winnipeg as a city in which Farsi is the predominant language, Rankin’s visually and narratively inventive film was inspired by Iranian films of the 1970s, frequently humanistic children’s fables, in this case transferred to a world of beige, concrete brutalist buildings and increasingly surreal, Tati-esque humor.
-- Academy Award Nominee for Best International Feature Film
-- Winner of the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival
“Nationalism gives way to interhuman solidarity in the dreamy, generous world of Matthew Rankin’s latest film.” – 4COLUMNS
“UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE is both culturally specific to Winnipeg and Tehran but, true to its title, quite universal in the emotional undercurrent of its triptych.” – ROGEREBERT.COM