Photographs by Jeff Harris.

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

It’s December in Winnipeg. Matthew Rankin, a Montreal bureaucrat, is travelling home to see his elderly mother. Most of his favourite spots are still there, but something is different; he feels lost, alienated. He sees two girls trying to free a large banknote frozen in ice. And he encounters a man who welcomes him into his home. After many years spent working in French, he is relieved to return to his native tongue and culture. But who would have guessed his universal language… is Farsi?

Universal Language is the name of a dream-like and haunting new feature that reimagines Canada’s two solitudes: francophone Quebec, and the rest of the country a unique mixture of Iran and the vast northern dominion. It’s as if Winnipeg froze unchanged somewhere in the 1980s and morphed into a non-religious People’s Republic of Iran. It’s co-written and directed by award-winning Winnipeg filmmaker Matthew Rankin, whose experimental films reimagine the country in a stylized and retro milieu. I interviewed him in 2020 about his first feature The Twentieth Century. The co-writers are both Iran-born and Montreal-based. Actor and multi-disciplinary artist Ila Firouzabadi is known for the violence and intimacy of her sculptures; while independent filmmaker, artist and actor Pirouz Nemati is completing an upcoming documentary on the matriarch of Montreal’s Byblos Le Petit Café.

I spoke with Matt, Ila and Pirouz on site at #TIFF24

Universal Language was lauded at Cannes and TIFF, on the list for an Oscar nomination for best international film, and will open in theatres soon.