Universal Language (2025)
Director: Matthew Rankin Run Time: 89 min. Release Year: 2024 Language: French
Starring: Mani Soleymanlou, Matthew Rankin, Pirouz Nemati, Rojina Esmaeili, Saba Vahedyousefi
Country: Canada
Language: Persian, French
“Universal Language is a magnificent film, one that feels warm and familiar even as we realize just how startlingly original it is.”
– Vulture
About the film:
Winter. Somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg. Negin and Nazgol find a large 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-absurd walking tour of Winnipeg monuments and historic sites. Matthew leaves his job at the Quebec government and embarks upon a mysterious journey to visit his estranged mother. Time, geography and identities crossfade, interweave and collide into a surreal comedy of misdirection.
Structured like a Venn diagram — at the point of confluence between Jacques Tati and Abbas Kiarostami’s The Koker Trilogy — Universal Language (2025) is at once a diary film, an absurdist city symphony and a welling-up of confinement-era emotion exploring the mysterious interzone where one person ends and the rest of the world begins. An elusive, half-remembered dream of home, solitude, our responsibilities to others and the wild turkeys that haunt us.
About the filmmaker:
Matthew Rankin is a Canadian experimental filmmaker. His feature-length debut, The Twentieth Century, premiered in 2019 and was nominated for eight Canadian Screen Awards, winning three.
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