UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (UNE LANGUE UNIVERSELLE), 2024

Canada| DCP, Color, 89’ | Persian, French

Director: Matthew Rankin

Cast: Matthew Rankin, Pirouz Nemati, Amir Amiri

Set in Winnipeg, where the official languages are Persian and French, the film tells the story of children who find themselves with strange tasks and characters who are scattered across the city for different purposes. Two of these characters are Massoud, a tour guide, and Matthew (the director himself), who resigns from his government job to join his mother in Manitoba. With the director's trademark dry humor and compassionate approach, he brings together geographically and cinematically disparate worlds and subverts our perception of time, space, and language by cleverly fictionalizing contemporary issues such as migration and displacement.