VIFF 2024 | From Winnipeg to Tehran – Finding A 'Universal Language'

"Winnipeg is a strange destination for tourism."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2024—Winnipeg meets Tehran frozen in the mid-'80s seems like a strange choice for Universal Language (aka Une langue universelle), a surrealist Canadian fable that acts as a creative tribute to Iranian New Wave cinema and life. Told in a deadpan tone reminiscent of the experimental filmmaker Matthew Rankin's usual quirky aesthetic, the Farsi-language film tells a warm Persian tale that has a familiar yet foreign design to its parallel universe setting.

Rankin's film is a remarkable achievement in blending his cinematic influences together in a cross-cultural melting pot of strange Canadian storytelling. Set in the sleepy, snow-covered wintery capital city of Manitoba, the minimalist plot follows disparate stories including one starring the writer/director himself whose character shares his name on his way back to Winnipeg after years of living in Montreal as a bureaucratic drone in the separatist Quebec provincial government.

How the film makes the Prairies in 1980s Canada look so nostalgically foreign yet familiar makes Universal Language all the more intriguing a concept outside of its Iranian cinematic references frozen in time. Rankin unspools a mish-mashed together past to express our collective foreignness of a changing national identity by way of the Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young People.

Universal Language has been selected as Canada's official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 97th annual Academy Awards. It screens at the 2024 Vancouver International Film Festival as part of the Showcase series at Fifth Avenue Cinemas on September 28th and International Village on September 29th.


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