It’s a chilly Tuesday morning, and director Matthew Rankin hasn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. “I feel like I’m going totally insane,” he admits as we sit down to discuss his new film, Universal Language. The filmmaker has been bouncing around from country to country for months, as the movie has garnered worldwide acclaim. First premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024, where it nabbed the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award, it went on to snatch up more trophies in Bangkok, Australia, Germany, Sweden, and of course, Canada — Rankin’s home country — at the Toronto International Film Festival. A hyper-specific yet strangely relatable surrealist comedy, the popularity of this charming ode to our kaleidoscope of cultures is a testament to how many people from different pockets of life can find familiarity through a film centered around Iranian school children attending a French immersion class within the borderlines of Winnipeg, Manitoba.
In the film, the lives of two kids, a tour guide, and a jaded government worker intertwine in mysterious ways somewhere between the confines of Iran and Canada. Upon discovering 500 Riels frozen in the winter ice, a pair of grade schoolers named Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) embark on a quest to excavate the buried treasure from the blanketed tundra. Meanwhile, Massoud (Pirouz Nemati) leads a group of increasingly stupefied tourists through the historic sites of Winnipeg, and across the way, Matthew (Matthew Rankin) quits his meaningless job in a Québecois government office and sets out on a journey to visit his estranged mother.
“I think Winnipeg is the world capital of the Hallmark movement in art,” director Rankin laughs. “I think something like thirty Christmas movies are filmed there per year.” As someone who grew up in Winnipeg himself, director Rankin knows better than anyone how often his city doubles as a fictional backdrop for a different location. “So yeah, Winnipeg, normally, is playing like a sweet little town in Vermont at Christmas time, but in our movie — I mean, of course, it’s an unusual Winnipeg, but it is Winnipeg.”
Infused with his father’s love of historically quaint hometown quirks, Rankin honed in on the authenticity that came with both shooting and telling a story about his old stomping grounds. Even the characteristically bitter cold of the Great White North couldn’t rattle his enthusiasm — at least not entirely. “It was very, very cold,” he remembers. “It was minus 30 for several days, and it’s very intense. It was very hard on us, because we were doing long takes, and certain things had to happen.” Pointedly, he adds, “You always end up speaking faster when it’s cold. So, we had to be careful to keep it slow.”
Based on a memory Rankin’s grandmother told him as a child, the concept of this production originated from a time when she found a two dollar bill frozen in a block of ice on a sidewalk in Winnipeg. “It was a story she told to illustrate her life during the depression,” he recalls. “It’s a story that captured my imagination, that I just remembered.” Then, later, when the filmmaker developed an affinity for Iranian cinema — particularly the films that were produced by the Kanoon Institute, a.k.a. the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young People, a company that produces several movies about the lives of children — he found an invisible thread connecting his reality with fantasy. “They’re all these very humanistic poetic fables about children navigating an adult world and learning something. It’s always about your responsibility to others, our duty to others.” Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House?, Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon, and A Simple Event by Sohrab Shahid Saless all stood out to the filmmaker, not only as goalposts of iconic modern cinema, but also as links to the very roots from whence he came.
“Something about these films reminded me of this story from my grandma,” says Rankin, “And that was something that I found to be touching, that my grandma was this little old octogenarian lady who’d always lived in Winnipeg, but I have this part of her life that would connect with these Iranian films on the other side of the world. That appealed to me, just as an idealistic person, and as someone who believes in the power of art to connect and create proximity between spaces that we normally imagine as being quite distant from each other. It also really inspired my collaborators, Ila [Firouzabadi] and Pirouz [Nemati]. The original idea was just to make a film about that: My grandma, fed through the prism of the Iranian cinematic language.”
Growing up, Rankin dreamed fondly of the day when he would be able to attend an Iranian film school. Although that exact narrative never quite materialized, the director found an alternate path through the process of collaboration and self discovery.
“I was naive about the ways of the world,” he says, “But I did go to Iran, and I spent a lot of time there, and met a lot of great people, and it sent me on this journey of dialogue with Iranian cinema.” For Rankin, making Universal Language was his film school. “I’m a big believer that each time you make a film, you’re learning how to see it,” the director muses. “You’re learning how to make that film. So in a way, that’s what this was.”
He adds, “Also, my parents died just before the pandemic, and I think that when you become an orphan, your sense of the world transforms a little bit. Your sense of belonging transforms a little bit, and your sense of family, your sense of space, your relationship with the house you grew up in, the room you slept in as a kid — all of these things begin to transform. We think of the film as a film about adoption, because it is a film that is about a broader sense of human belonging than we typically understand. It comes from a love of cinematic language, and it also comes from a very personal place.”
Perhaps now, more than ever, a movie like Universal Language resonates, as established powers seek to soften our collective strength by highlighting our petty differences. As director Rankin sees it, we are “composite people,” a melting pot of various ethnicities and ideologies, and that’s something to be celebrated, not feared. “We are the result of a very complex ecosystem, which we can trace through every one of our mothers since the beginning of time, which has put us in a position where we’re all here, alive, simultaneously, and that is a very beautiful, and sometimes, even an absurd and very mystifying sequence,” he says. “We try to contain the world, and we imagine it in political binaries, in geopolitics, but in our interpersonal lives it’s this very easy, fluid, cross-flow.”
Director Rankin is a true auteur, and he finds magic in the everyday infrastructure of cold, hard steel and towering beige fresco buildings. Shot in Farsi and captured on 16mm film, congested highways and Kleenex Depositories loom over tiny layered citizens on the snow like giants punching down.
“I find brutalism to be very beautiful,” states a starry-eyed Rankin. “I love all these structures and I love what they can do. I love how they assign a lot of the blocking of the film, how we covered the action. A lot of that was dictated, to a very large degree, by the angles of these structures. Sometimes that’s very mysterious, sometimes it’s very funny, and depending on the building, it has the potential to energize. It is a film that is tracing lines between different coordinates.”
The opening shot is an excellent statement of the theme that collaborators Rankin, Firouzabadi and Nemati, who are all credited as writers and producers, hope to express. A stationary camera frames a brutal concrete wall sandwiched between snow and sky. Cold sunlight beams in through a tiny opening in a small window. A group of school children noisily interact inside a classroom when suddenly, a furious teacher enters the scene, trudging through the white embankment, up to the door, inside the building, and finally, to where we can see through the window joins the children, and proceeds to berate them with grievances.
“We see a character go in, and as he goes in, the sound moves through that wall, and we hear what’s going on inside,” says Rankin. “We’re still outside, but we hear what’s inside. Then, another character arrives, and the sound comes back out, and we hear outside and inside simultaneously. We’re in two spaces at once. We have moved back and forth between this very great wall of dense concrete, and that is a way of transcending distance and tracing proximities across distance. It’s also this notion of the rigid and the fluid: this idea that we are living in this time in history, which is very rigid, and full of binaries and walls.” The filmmaker continues, “Every day, there are these new Berlin Walls that seem to be shooting up all around us in politics, in our economies, and on social media. That’s very troubling to me and my collaborators, but as I say, I do think that our lives as humans are not like that. Our lives are infinitely more fluid than that — and we do flow together like a river.”
How do we begin to come together as a people? Conceivably, it can be as simple as acceptance. For example, accepting that your neighbor likes to dress up like a sparkling Christmas tree, year-round.
“A lot of the details [in Universal Language] come from my own life,” explains Rankin. “The Christmas tree man — it’s a man dressed as a Christmas tree at one point in the film, if you remember, the kids encounter him — that was based on a lady in my neighborhood.” As Rankin remembers it, when he was a boy, a woman who lived nearby loved to roam the local streets adorned in Yuletide attire (quite literally), even in the peak heat of summer. “She wasn’t dressed as a tree, but she wore tinsel, and Christmas ornaments, and she would have a star on her head,” he smiles. “She would wish you a Merry Christmas, even when it was April, and she was just obsessed. Growing up, we loved this lady, she was just amazing. We didn’t even think of her as an eccentric, that was just what she was, just a lady in our neighborhood. That character’s a little tribute to her.”
Like much of Rankin’s work, Universal Language is somewhat autobiographical. Driving this notion home, the writer-director takes on a role in the cast as he, in a way, plays himself, even sporting his very own name.
“I’m a filmmaker that likes to put myself in a certain amount of danger,” says Rankin, who believes that wallowing in one’s comfort zone can stifle artistic expression. In order to avoid tedium, the director consistently tests himself with new and terrifying challenges. “I find that’s a very creative tension, and it means I can’t be complacent on any level,” he comments. “It’s actually me, and it’s me performing in two languages, neither of which are my mother tongue. That’s an extra level of difficulty, and I like that. I find that very exciting.”
The director, who seeks to shake things up and expand the paradigm, feeds little details from his life through a prism of defamiliarization. Rankin hopes that when you look at a familiar space from an unfamiliar angle, you can see it more clearly, and it creates a new understanding.
“The kid who’s dressed as Groucho — that comes from me when I was an eight-year-old,” says Rankin. “For some weird reason, my mother let me use her eyebrow pencil to draw a mustache and eyebrows on my face every morning when I went to school. So, that was another little detail.”
Each of the three plots carries its own cinematic language. Iranian poetic realism is represented by the first plot of the two little girls, echoing the tale told to him by Rankin’s grandmother. At the other end of the spectrum is Massoud, the tour guide’s story, who wholly and completely embodies Rankin’s father, “a lifelong enthusiast of Winnipeg history and its bland historic sites.” In the film, Massoud serves as a fleshed-out example of Winnipeg absurdism. The third plot, in which Rankin plays himself, inspired by Matthew’s own departure from government employment, is very much associated with what he calls, “Quebecois melancholy.”
“Quebec cinema has a lot of films about lonesome, maladjusted bachelor protagonists on a death march into total meaninglessness,” comments Rankin, who gives voice to the many languages at work within his picture. “They’re all remixed and reordered, and recycled, and given new functions in this film, and of course, blended into a whole, so that they become something new.”
Still, some of the details are just thrown in for fun. One might even catch the eye of a native northerner. “
“There’s the ‘Rod Peeler: I Never Sleep’ Bench, which I really like quite a lot,” boasts the director with a genuine grin. “Rod Peeler is a real person. He is Winnipeg’s most beloved real estate agent, and he has these benches all over the city, which say, ‘Rod Peeler: I Never Sleep.’ He also has a side hustle as a Rod Stewart impersonator. I threw that in when I was working on the storyboard. I thought that would just be a thing that would set off little narcotic synapses in the brain of Winnipeg. Weirdly, absolutely everywhere that we’ve shown the movie, that gets a big reaction from people.”
“Universal Language” is in limited release at The Alamo Drafthouse and Roxy Theater.
