Universal Language
Wes Anderson meets Jafar Panahi in this absurdist comedy, where everyone in the Canadian provincial city of Winnipeg suddenly speaks Farsi (Persian).
Introverted civil servant Matthew (played by director Matthew Rankin) leaves Montreal to visit his ailing mother in his hometown of Winnipeg. Once there, he discovers that everyone inexplicably speaks Farsi, and time appears to have stopped sometime in the late 1980s. As Matthew gets caught up in the surreal search for a pair of glasses stolen by a turkey, we follow tour guide Massoud as he leads a group of bewildered tourists past Winnipeg's monuments and historical oddities.
In Universal Language’s press kit, director Matthew Rankin describes his film as ‘an autobiographical hallucination, a cinematic Venn diagram of Winnipeg, Tehran and Montreal, an ode to the Iranian cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, a confluence of rivers... or a pizza Hawaii’. In such a bizarre cinematic universe, a long-lost briefcase can be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a warehouse full of Kleenex handkerchiefs becomes a local landmark.
Universal Language premiered at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes in Cannes, where it won the Audience Award. It was also Canada’s official submission for the Oscars.