
Matthew Rankin’s Persian-French language Canadian film Universal Language is among the fifteen shortlisted for the Best International Feature Film Oscar and perhaps the most unique of the lot in terms of form, vision, imagination and craft.
Set in an unusual world, a Tehran-like Winnipeg, the whimsical, fablesque film weaves together three seemingly disparate, disconnected story strands in unforeseen, humane and humanistic ways. Rankin’s second feature film recently played at the 21st Marrakech International Film Festival, where the Canadian filmmaker had an exclusive one-on-one conversation with CE.
Excerpts:
Universal Language occupies this unique visual space where Tehran and Winnipeg collide and conjoin. You’ve made even a wholesome Canadian chain like Tim Hortons go Farsi. What went into defining the production design of the film?
First of all, it was through a conversation with Ila (Firouzabadi) and Pirouz (Nemati) and all of our other collaborators. It was about creating this unusual brain, this sort of Tehran-o—Winnipeg-ua brain, which would bring the codes and the iconographies of two spaces — between which we might imagine great geographic and existential distance—into close proximity.
It was always about trying to figure out what elements we blend with each other and how we make a whole out of that. It was about using codes and iconographies and spaces where you might imagine that you’re at one place, but the imperfection of the codes tells you that you might be somewhere else. We try to do that throughout.
The code tells you one thing, but the presentation tells you something else. So, where you are in time and space is something we wanted to upend. You’re in this third space, and the production design was about creating it.
Also kids being in focus in your film, is something we associate with Iranian films…
That’s true. The story (about Negin and Nazgol) comes from my grandmother’s childhood. It was a story she told me about finding money in the ice, but it reminded me so much of Iranian films.
The film set me thinking about the predominant, conventional immigrant/exile narrative in cinema. However, your vision — Winnipeg getting taken over by Tehran — comes as a multicultural perspective in an increasingly intolerant world. Also, the notion of family—the adopted/surrogate as opposed to inherited — is a very humanistic, hopeful one…
From the get-go we were working from a position of no borders and absolute belonging. Many films are structured around oppositional paradigms. Our world is also increasingly constructed around oppositional paradigms. The idea of placing all of us into separate containers, and organising the world into containers.
This is my container, that is yours. My sense is that, especially in the last five years, many new Berlin walls have shot up all around us. I feel like the way we organise the world — in politics, in social media, in economies, even to some degree in the way we approach culture and the way we are even in cinema—you can see how these rigidities have sort of installed themselves. But, I feel that, despite all that, our experience of the world is infinitely more fluid.
We are part of a much more complex ecosystem, and we are mutually dependent on each other, and that’s a beautiful thing. We’re all here, and we’re all alive for a very limited time, and it would be tragic for us to not find some way to be close. So, the movie is about that closeness. It’s about creating a proximity where you might imagine great distance, a community where you might imagine enormous solitude, and a universality where you might imagine parochialism. It was this idealistic notion driving all of us.
I remember reading a comment about how your film brings the spirit of Abbas Kiarostami and Kaurismaki Brothers together to create something unique of its own…
It is about cinematic language. There are codes of cinema that we associate with these Iranian masters and also codes of Canadian cinema, and the idea was to create a Venn diagram. And, strangely, the centre of that Venn diagram seems to be Scandinavia. I don’t know why. So, Tehran plus Winnipeg equals Helsinki.