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Universal Language from director Matthew Rankin, which earned an audience prize presented to the best film in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the Cannes film festival, has been chosen by Canada to compete in the best international feature category at the Academy Awards.

The absurdist comedy in the Farsi and French languages is an offbeat homage to Iranian cinema that takes place n the Canadian cities of Montreal and Winnipeg. In Universal Language, Rankin reimagines a Canada where Farsi is now a dominant tongue.

Structured like a Venn diagram, Universal Language according to a synopsis becomes “a diary film, an absurdist city symphony and a welling-up of confinement-era emotion exploring the mysterious interzone where one person ends and the rest of the world begins. An elusive, half remembered dream of home, solitude, our responsibilities to others and the wild turkeys that haunt us.”

Director Rankin added in a statement on...

"A strange odyssey with plenty of riches." Oscilloscope Labs has revealed the first trailer for an acclaimed, one-of-a-kind film from Canada titled Universal Language, the second feature from Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin (after the icy The Twentieth Century). It premiered to rave reviews at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival in the Directors' Fortnight sidebars - one of the best discoveries of Cannes 2024. Two kids find frozen cash, and try to retrieve it. A tour guide leads confused tourists around Winnipeg sites. A man quits his job, visits his mother. Storylines intertwine surreally as identities blur in a disorienting comedy. Starring Matthew Rankin, Pirouz Nemati, Rojina Esmaeili, Danielle Fichaud, and Sobhan Javadi. Rankin adds: "think of it as cinematic Venn diagramme between Winnipeg, Tehran, Montréal. It’s like a confluence of rivers. Or a Hawaiian pizza. It’s a crazy duck-billed platypus of a movie: one part lonesome Québécois cinéma gris, one part surreal Winnipeg puzzle film,...

There is nothing lost in translation when it comes to “The Twentieth Century” filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s surreal triptych comedy “Universal Language.”

The feature, which debuted at Cannes 2024 and was deemed an IndieWire Critic’s Pick before winning the Audience Award in Directors’ Fortnight, is written and directed by Rankin, who also stars as a version of himself. Rankin described the film in press notes as an “autobiographical hallucination” that led him to travel from his native Winnipeg to Tehran to find the cinematic auteurs he grew up watching. “Universal Language” is co-written by Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi.

The official synopsis reads: “In a mysterious and surreal interzone somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg, the lives of multiple characters interweave with each other in surprising and mysterious ways. Grade-schoolers Negin and Nazgol find a sum of money frozen in the winter ice and try to claim it. Meanwhile, Massoud leads...

Despite being set in a parallel-universe Winnipeg where the people talk in Farsi and the world around them seems as if it’s been frozen in time since the mid-1980s, the haunted but hopeful “Universal Language” is an unmistakably modern film at heart.

Described by writer-director Matthew Rankin as a piece of “autobiographical hallucination,” this wonderfully deadpan whatsit is the work of a white 43-year-old Canadian man who fell in love with the movies a time when “foreign” cinema was becoming more available to people outside major cultural hubs. He found that Kanoon-style fables like “Where Is the Friend’s House?” and “The White Balloon” spoke to him in a way that few English-language films ever had. That discovery sparked a cross-cultural dialogue that eventually compelled Rankin to visit Tehran in an effort to locate the auteurs who had inspired him and learn why their films had whispered in his ear.

In Universal Language, a man makes a journey to his childhood home and meets the family now living there––these are at least the broad strokes. The director is Matthew Rankin, a Canadian filmmaker whose work usually requires less-basic terms. In his previous film The Twentieth Century, Rankin reimagined the life of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, through a lens of German expressionism: a trippy Brazil with a masturbation complex. Much of the casting was done either cross-gender or color-blind: “In a school play you can have a Filipino Captain von Trapp and a transgender Artful Dodger and it’s fine,“ Rankin explained at the time. ”In film, I don’t understand why there’s this pressure to always link an actor to their exact demographic profile.”

For Universal Language, Rankin takes that idea to a different place: the Winnipeg of this film is, for wont...

In the Canadian cities of Montreal and Winnipeg, a futile tension exists between French and English speakers — doubly silly, since the country is officially bilingual. In his gently satirical “Universal Language,” writer-director Matthew Rankin imagines a rather fanciful solution, where Farsi is now the region’s dominant tongue. Taking his cues from such Iranian classics as “Children of Heaven” and “The White Balloon,” Rankin mixes the humanism of Majid Majidi, Jafar Panahi, et al. with his own peculiar brand of comedy (as seen in the more off-the-wall “The Twentieth Century”), offering a delightful cross-cultural hybrid designed to celebrate our differences.

Though Rankin shows a genuine affection for all things Persian, the first and most obvious hiccup to his premise is that audiences don’t necessarily share his interest or his references. There’s something inherently provocative — and perhaps even triggering to some — about seeing a nondescript Canadian elementary school where...