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Une langue universelle
Universal Language is a breathtakingly gorgeous film - transforming Winnipeg's scant landscape and brutalist architecture into something you refuse to tear your eyes from. Think Monty Python meets Finnish legend Aki Kaurismaki meets Iranian auteur, Abbas Kiarostami. Short-listed for Best International Film for the 2025 Oscars.
Farsi, French, and English with English subtitles
Content advisory: mild profanity, smoking and drinking. Ages 12+
Director Matthew Rankin and Actor/writer Ila Firouzabadi in attendance.
Matthew Rankin has brought a sense of entertainment to Canadian cinema that our industry is desperately lacking. He is uninhibited in his worldbuilding - taking elements of Winnipeggian isolation, Quebecois absurdity, Canada's Iranian diaspora, and smashing them together to transport his viewers into a universe where Canadian anglo culture is conspicuously, and gratefully, missing; Louis Riel is commemorated on our dollar (as he should); and turkeys hold all the cultural currency (as they should). - Maia, Letterboxd