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It’s the weekend Winnipeg movie fans have been waiting for.
After months of touring prestigious film events like the Cannes Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival, Universal Language finally received its Winnipeg premiere on Thursday night at the Centre Culturel Franco-Manitobain. Fans showed such an interest in this project that the screening had to be moved to the CCFM to accommodate the demand, which was magnified after the film was revealed as the Canadian submission for Best International Feature at the upcoming Academy Awards.
For Universal Language’s director and star Matthew Rankin, this reception is a dream come true. “It feels great,” he said ahead of the film’s Winnipeg debut. “It’s a movie that I really made kind of for my friends. I feel like Winnipeggers watching it will understand more than anyone else, so it’s really fun.”
The story of Universal Language follows three separate storylines. The first features Rankin playing a character version of himself who moves back to Winnipeg after quitting an office job in Montreal (where Rankin now lives) to care for his mother. He finds a tour guide there (played by collaborator Pirouz Nemati), who also is guiding people through Winnipeg to stop at somewhat absurd landmarks. The third concerns two young children (played by Saba Vahedyousefi and Rojina Esmaeili) who find a piece of currency under the ice (a banknote with Louis Riel’s likeness on it) and try to get it out.
While Winnipeggers will undoubtedly recognize Winnipeg cultural landmarks in the film – a bus bench featuring real estate agent Rod Peeler, the fountain at the centre of the Portage Place mall, the Nutty Club building in the downtown – the Winnipeg in Universal Language will also feel foreign. Rankin sets the three stories that interweave their way through Universal Language in a Winnipeg where the two official languages are Farsi and French, and Old Dutch chips are sold in an open-air market. Images of former premier Brian Pallister hang on the wall as though he were an Ayatollah.
Rankin’s inspiration for the film comes from the Iranian cinematic tradition, which he fell in love with as a young man. “I went really deep learning about it and I had this ambition to go to Iran and study with the great Iranian masters of cinema. That was my dream as a very naïve young man that didn’t work out, but my life has had this sort of dialogue with the Iranian cinema since that.”
That dialogue has meant that Rankin has been steeped in this style of filmmaking for many years, and the characteristics of this creation have made their way into his works, most prominently now in Universal Language. “It’s a very poetic cinema, it’s a very humanistic cinema,” Rankin explains. “It’s not trying to pin you to your seat, and it allows you to have your own relationship with what you’re watching.”
This unique cinematic language blends together in what Rankin describes as the distinct cinematic language of Winnipeg to create Universal Language. “It’s kind of like two spheres that are being interlocked and interwoven, and the idea is to create sort of a new space that is at the confluence of Tehran and Winnipeg.”
Movie fans can take in the confluence that is Universal Language at the Scotiabank Theatre at Polo Park where it opens on January 24. Movie fans can also see Rankin in conversation about the “The Winnipeg Effect” of movies with fellow acclaimed filmmaker Guy Maddin on January 25 at 5 p.m. in the Asper Centre for Theatre and Film at the University of Winnipeg. Tickets for this talk are available at the Dave Barber Cinematheque's website.
