Set in a Winnipeg where somehow everyone speaks Farsi, Universal Language is an absurd comedy/drama from Matthew Rankin, which was Canada’s submission to this year’s Academy Awards. It plays at Manchester Film Festival 2025.
If I may be allowed to give one piece of advice to viewers of Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, it would be this: don’t miss the first five minutes. Bizarre as it is, the opening scene helps to anchor all the gentle absurdity and surreal behaviour which is about to happen.
A static camera watches a teacher arriving at his school, late, as we observe through the window that his class is causing a riot. The teacher (Mani Soleymanlou) begins to berate the pupils, telling them that they will amount to nothing and he despairs for their future; he reminds them that he is supposed to be their favourite teacher – his logic being that he has an earring and wears a turtle neck sweater, don’t you know. We will meet the ambitious diplomat Negin (Rojina Esmaeili), the budding tour guide Omid (Sobhan Javadi), and the aspiring comedian who goes to school dressed as Groucho Marx later on, as their escapades criss-cross the non-linear timeline of the film.
The school is the Robert H Smith school in Winnipeg, although it’s a version of Winnipeg in which everything appears to be trapped in the early 1980s, all the signs are in Farsi, and everyone speaks Farsi – well, except for the Québecois, who of course continue to speak French.
Matthew Rankin himself plays one of the characters, Matthew, who leaves his job in Quebec to return home to visit his mother in Winnipeg for her birthday. When he eventually arrives, his mother’s house is occupied by a different family, and she is living elsewhere with Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), a person who she thinks is her son.
Massoud is a local tour guide, leading his group around empty shopping malls and beige architecture where no one important has lived, while his son’s classmate is trying to find a way to extract a banknote from a block of ice.
The whole thing definitely has a feel of Roy Andersson about it, with lots of static shots and absurd conversations which feel completely normal to those in the middle of them. But underlying the surreal events and situations, there’s a real sense of the humanity; that we are all, in our own way, looking for something and that, if we allow ourselves to look hard enough, we can see ourselves reflected in others,
Universal Language is bizarre, but touching – one of those films that I don’t normally enjoy, but which moved me quite a bit.
Universal Language plays at Manchester Film Festival (14th – 23rd March 2025).
Set in a Winnipeg where somehow everyone speaks Farsi, Universal Language is an absurd comedy/drama from Matthew Rankin, which was Canada’s submission to this year’s Academy Awards. It plays at Manchester Film Festival 2025.
If I may be allowed to give one piece of advice to viewers of Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, it would be this: don’t miss the first five minutes. Bizarre as it is, the opening scene helps to anchor all the gentle absurdity and surreal behaviour which is about to happen.
A static camera watches a teacher arriving at his school, late, as we observe through the window that his class is causing a riot. The teacher (Mani Soleymanlou) begins to berate the pupils, telling them that they will amount to nothing and he despairs for their future; he reminds them that he is supposed to be their favourite teacher – his logic being that he has an earring and wears a turtle neck sweater, don’t you know. We will meet the ambitious diplomat Negin (Rojina Esmaeili), the budding tour guide Omid (Sobhan Javadi), and the aspiring comedian who goes to school dressed as Groucho Marx later on, as their escapades criss-cross the non-linear timeline of the film.
The school is the Robert H Smith school in Winnipeg, although it’s a version of Winnipeg in which everything appears to be trapped in the early 1980s, all the signs are in Farsi, and everyone speaks Farsi – well, except for the Québecois, who of course continue to speak French.
Matthew Rankin himself plays one of the characters, Matthew, who leaves his job in Quebec to return home to visit his mother in Winnipeg for her birthday. When he eventually arrives, his mother’s house is occupied by a different family, and she is living elsewhere with Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), a person who she thinks is her son.
Massoud is a local tour guide, leading his group around empty shopping malls and beige architecture where no one important has lived, while his son’s classmate is trying to find a way to extract a banknote from a block of ice.
The whole thing definitely has a feel of Roy Andersson about it, with lots of static shots and absurd conversations which feel completely normal to those in the middle of them. But underlying the surreal events and situations, there’s a real sense of the humanity; that we are all, in our own way, looking for something and that, if we allow ourselves to look hard enough, we can see ourselves reflected in others,
Universal Language is bizarre, but touching – one of those films that I don’t normally enjoy, but which moved me quite a bit.
Universal Language plays at Manchester Film Festival (14th – 23rd March 2025).
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