When it comes to art films, Winnipeg is usually one of the last Canadian cities to see a theatrical release. Any Winnipegger who has ever attempted an early handicap of the Oscars knows it’s not unusual to wait well into January before the city has a shot to see an Oscar contender that opened in Toronto for Christmas.
So it’s refreshing to see Winnipeg will get the Canadian theatrical premiere of Universal Language, which is already on the Oscar short list for best international feature film.
The Academy Award nominations are set to be announced Jan. 23, the day Universal Language opens at Winnipeg’s Dave Barber Cinematheque, for a run continuing to Feb. 5.
Credit director Matthew Rankin, who shot the film in Winnipeg in March of 2023 and screened it at festivals at Cannes and Toronto before finally bringing it home to the city of his birth.
“I’m really dying to show it in Winnipeg,” Rankin, who currently lives in Montreal, said in a September interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the Best Canadian Discovery Award.
“It kind of pains me that we have to show it everywhere except Winnipeg.”
Winnipeggers, though, should expect to see a film that displays the city in a way it has never been seen before — a place where the official languages are Farsi and French, where ominous propaganda banners featuring former real-life premier Brian Pallister adorn the downtown Portage Place mall, where the common dollar currency manifests in “Riel” bills, and the local Tim Hortons serves up its hot beverages in a samovar.
Guy Maddin, who has also presented a surreal interpretation of the city in his 2007 “docu-fantasia” My Winnipeg, praised the film as an “unlikely hybrid” at a dialogue event he and Rankin shared during TIFF at the CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio. (Maddin and Rankin will offer an encore of sorts at the Dave Barber Cinematheque on Saturday, Jan. 25 at 5 p.m., discussing “the Winnipeg effect.”)
“It works,” Maddin said. “It just gets airborne right away, like a dream, like you’ve eaten too much Persian food and gone to sleep and dreamed of your hometown.”
Rankin says he fashioned the film as a personal tribute to Iranian cinema.
“We always say that Iranian cinema emerges out of 1,000 years of poetry and Winnipeg cinema emerges out of 50 years of Kern-Hill Furniture Co-op commercials,” he said of the fusion.
“It’s strange to put these two things together,” said Rankin. “It’s absurd. But it’s really beautiful.”
‘I was an annoying little child’
The film weaves vivid threads in its story. One follows two children (Saba Vahedyousefi and Rojina Esmaeili) who discover a valuable Riel bill trapped under ice and go on an odyssey to find an axe to chop it out.
Rankin himself appears as “Matthew,” a man who decides to quit work at a Montreal bureaucracy to head to Winnipeg to live with his widowed mother. But Matthew is nonplussed to discover a Winnipeg tour guide named Massoud (played by Pirouz Nemati, who co-scripted the film with Rankin and Ila Firouzabadi) has been taking care of his mother in his absence.
The film deliberately pays homage to Iranian films such as the Abbas Kiarostami film Where Is the Friend’s House (1987), or the Kiarostami/Jafar Panahi collaboration The White Balloon (1995). Rankin also employed a multitude of Iranian Canadian friends he made in Montreal and Winnipeg, both in front of the camera and behind it.
At the same time, the film is deeply personal for Rankin. The film’s search to get money from beneath a barrier of ice “came from my grandmother who grew up in the West End,” he said.
“Her brother found a $2 bill in 1932, frozen in the ice. They went on this odyssey to find an axe, and this hobo cheated them out of it,” said Rankin.
“That story always reminded me of Iranian films from the 1980s, where children are facing adult dilemmas. This movie is kind of a version of that, the idea of telling the story through the language of Iranian poetic realism.”
An early vignette in the film sees a rebellious boy dressing up as Groucho Marx, in an apparent bid to torment his teacher. Rankin says the boy is based on him.
“I was an annoying little child,” Rankin said. “I was obsessed with the Marx Brothers.”
His parents, “for some reason,” encouraged his interest, he said.
“Every morning with my mother’s eyebrow pencil, I would draw a moustache and eyebrows on my face and go to school like that,” Rankin said. “They even let me have a cigar, which is really kind of strange.”
His teachers were “unbelievably irritated by this,” Rankin said. “They just hated me.”
Another scene sees Rankin visit his father’s grave, which sits uncomfortably close to a busy highway. That, too, was lifted from personal experience.
“My mother died right before the pandemic, on Feb. 29, [2020]. It was very sudden,” said Rankin, who was in Berlin screening a movie at the time.
“I went back to Winnipeg and the world immediately shut down, so I was walking through all these familiar streets in a discombobulated state of grieving,” and “encountering Winnipeg through a completely new prism,” he said.
The graveyard scene’s inspiration came from “cemetery shopping at Chapel Lawn,” on Winnipeg’s western edge and just off the Trans-Canada Highway, he said.
“It was right next to the highway and this very noisy traffic, and I was struck by how absurd that was.”
But Rankin asserts that while many of the film’s moments may seem like inside jokes, the film’s appeal should be wide.
“There’s little references and little jokes that Winnipeggers will have the greatest pleasure of all watching,” Rankin said.
“Some of the jokes are for Farsi speakers. They will have great pleasure in these moments. Some of the jokes only work in French, so French people will have the greatest pleasure in these moments. You can encounter them from other angles as well,” he said.
“The movie is prisms within prisms.”
This post was originally published on here
