Universal Language

Matthew Rankin’s weird and wonderful imagination has served him well in his many inventive shorts and in his first feature THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, but the Winnipeg-bred, Montreal-based filmmaker reaches a new plateau of awe-inspiring oddness with his extraordinary second feature. An absurdist tragicomedy with a series of interconnected tales, it’s set in an alternate-universe but still plenty wintry version of Winnipeg in which the Iranian-Canadian community predominates, such that Farsi and French are Canada’s two official languages. The preponderance of turkeys and Kleenex repositories is one of many further whimsical details. Yet however strange Rankin’s tactics may seem, he also tells a moving story about the search for home and human connection. Canada’s most recent submission for the best international feature at the Academy Awards, it is also one of the year’s most acclaimed films, winning major prizes at the Toronto, Vancouver and Melbourne festivals.

L’imagination étrange et merveilleuse de Matthew Rankin brille une fois de plus dans son deuxième long métrage extraordinaire. Tragicomédie absurde avec une série d’histoires interconnectées, le film se déroule dans une version alternative mais glaciale de Winnipeg, où la communauté irano-canadienne domine, et où le farsi et le français sont les langues officielles du Canada. Le réalisateur utilise des détails fantaisistes – comme la prolifération de dindes et de boîtes de mouchoirs – pour raconter une histoire touchante sur la quête d’un foyer et de liens humains. Sélection canadienne pour l’Oscar du meilleur film international, UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE a remporté des prix majeurs aux festivals de Toronto, Vancouver et Melbourne, confirmant son statut de chef-d’œuvre inoubliable.

Director: Matthew Rankin

Cast: Matthew Rankin, Pirouz Nemati

Language: French, Persian

Runtime: 89 minutes

Content advisory: 

MATTHEW RANKIN, DIRECTOR

Matthew Rankin was born in Winnipeg and is the director of forty-some short films and two features. His work has been presented at Sundance, SXSW, New York Film Festival, TIFF, Annecy, the Berlinale, Cannes Critics Week, Cannes Directors Fortnight, and on the Criterion Channel. His first feature, The Twentieth Century (2019), was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize of the International Film Critics at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival, and his second long-format fiction, Une langue universelle (2024), was awarded the Chantal Ackerman Prize at Cannes Directors Fortnight and the Bright Horizons Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

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