Universal Language

This screening took place on Saturday, February 8, 2025 at 9:00 pmYukon Arts Centre

Une langue universelle

Winter. Somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg. Negin and Nazgol find a sum of money frozen deep within the sidewalk ice and try to find a way to get it out. Massoud leads a group of befuddled tourists upon an increasingly-strange walking tour of Winnipeg historic sites. Matthew leaves his job at the Québec government and embarks upon a mysterious journey to visit his estranged mother. An autobiographical hallucination from the writer/ director of The 20th Century (ALFF 2020).

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

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