"It's kind of next level in a lot of ways to see Winnipeggers saying, 'We've never seen a more authentic depiction of Winnipeg than this,'" director and co-writer Matthew Rankin remarks. "And it's a movie in Farsi."
A few days after the Montreal premiere of Universal Language, Rankin joins co-writers Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati on a Zoom call with Exclaim! to reflect on their feature film that transposes Tehran onto Winnipeg, with Farsi and French as its official languages. It's won a number of awards since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last year, including a shortlisted nomination for the Academy Awards' Best International Feature Film prize — making it the first Canadian film to make the shortlist since 2016 — and a spot on Exclaim!'s list of the most anticipated films of the year.
Heavily influenced by Iranian New Wave cinema, it's a surreal melting pot of absurdism, poetry, grief and homage to friendship.
While the Winnipeg crowd had an appreciation for the humour of the film — what Rankin describes as a "comic tableau" of dry humour — he adds that Montreal audiences connected more with the poetic and philosophical elements of the film. The Tehran premiere has also recently taken place with similar welcome.
"We showed [the film] in Tehran in a very small underground cinema, and their reaction was really surprisingly beautiful," Firouzabadi reflects. "They really connected [to the film] with their heart. We did the Q&A online, and they said, 'I think you did this movie for us! Matthew, you are one of us! It was so beautiful."
What may appear as an unlikely cultural mashup is an organic outcome of the trio's years-long friendship. Rankin, who was born and raised in Winnipeg before resettling in Montreal as an adult, has a love of Iranian cinema which briefly brought him to Iran to study in his early 20s. Firouzabadi and Nemati were both born in Iran and moved to Montreal later in life. Through their varying backgrounds, they've found that Winnipeg and Iran are not all that different.
"I think Winnipegers, like Iranians, are used to suffering. There's something brutal about [each] society; in Winnipeg, it's the weather and the conditions, and in Iran, it's a different thing. But that's something that we share," Nemati notes. "And [for] Winnipeggers, like Iranians, there's a huge diaspora. We've shown the film all over the world, and there's always been Iranians and Winnipeggers [in the audience]," he laughs.
The film takes us along three converging fables; two children seek to extract money from an ice block; a guide, played by Nemati, takes increasingly frustrated tourists on a tour of mundane sites in Winnipeg; and Matthew, playing himself, quits his job as a bureaucrat in Montreal and journeys to Winnipeg to visit his aging mother. It's partially autobiographical; Rankin's parents died shortly before the pandemic, when the bulk of the creative work on the film took place.
"I think [for] a lot of people, when they become orphans, their sense of belonging begins to transform. [The film is] very much on the theme of adoption and creating connections between spaces [in] which we normally imagine distance," Rankin observes.
Home becomes increasingly unfamiliar and surreal in Universal Language, as Rankin's character rediscovers Winnipeg amid palpable cold and beige brutalist architecture, but this is always subverted with a distinct warmth that forms the heart of the film.
When Matthew first arrives, we see him trudge across a barren snowy space. Steam from a lone street vendor selling hot Iranian tea soon interrupts our perception of his solitude. Later, outside a Tim Hortons along a highway, we witness an uncharacteristically long hug, an intimacy that feels out of place in the roadside parking lot where they stand. In every element of the film, Rankin acknowledges the existence of a boundary, then rejects it.
"Sacha figured out this drone for [the hug scene]. When you bring a drone into a soundtrack, it's usually to create tension or darkness or some sort of evil is beginning to swell, but [the drone in this shot] is so warm and so beautiful," Rankin says of sound designer Sacha Ratcliffe's ability to manipulate sound to create fluidity. "It's my favourite sound moment in the movie."
Through its disorientation, Universal Language captures a sense of otherness or liminality that is characteristic of diaspora. In his hometown, Matthew finds familiarity is just out of reach. A first impression of the film might falsely read the Iranians in Winnipeg as immigrants, but Rankin instead positions himself in Winnipeg's diaspora. As the film invites us into Matthew's nostalgia and the grief of trying to find a home that no longer exists as he once knew it, it expands our conceptions of belonging.
"It is about creating a space of belonging that is broader and gentler and wider than the typical way in which we organize the world," Rankin explains. "The fluid experience of actually being alive is very different from the way we try to contain the world."
Though a Canadian film in Farsi could present a challenge both during production and reception, Nemati believes that the film's inclusive sense of community is the key ingredient to Universal Language's authenticity and, in turn, its success. Along with playing roles in the film themselves, the trio cast dear friends, many not professional actors, and gave them space to interpret their roles. This decision enables the film to serve as a reflection of the found family that Rankin, Firouzabadi and Nemati cultivated as fellow outsiders in Montreal.
"What I appreciate the most about Matthew's approach [is his idea of] creating this, as he calls it, 'brain' that was calibrated in a way that we would each contribute something to it, and we would kind of become one," Nemati says.
"Making a film is a [not a] transactional process, despite the way we try to industrialize it and commercialize it. That never yields spiritual results," Rankin elaborates. "A film that is spiritually sound is made by spiritual people who really have something to say together. Us performing together was an expression of that intimacy and that closeness between us."
Especially for those of us who have planted roots outside of where we come from, Universal Language gifts us an acceptance of the in-between and an appreciation for the connections gained from this enigmatic space.