Matthew Rankin’s Persian-French language Canadian film, Universal Language, is one among the fifteen shortlisted for the Best International Feature Film award at the Oscars and, perhaps the most unique of the lot when it comes to its 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.
A turkey runs away with a child’s spectacles. His friends Negin and Nazgol go on the lookout for it, chance upon money frozen in ice and go on a mission to find an axe to dig it out with. Travel guide Massoud, always clad in earmuffs, takes disinterested tour groups through the most uncelebrated city sites. And Matthew decides to quit his job with the government of Quebec in Montreal to come back home to his long-forgotten and ailing mother in Winnipeg. Meanwhile, a man dressed as a Christmas tree wanders around pointlessly, while the Canadian band, The Guess Who’s popular song “These Eyes” plays on as the background score.
True to its title, Universal Language underscores the idea of multiculturalism and interconnectedness, unity in diversity, solidarity, friendship, kinship, and community spirit.
Rankin’s second feature film had its world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at Cannes 2024 where it won the audience award and recently played at the 21st Marrakech International Film festival.
It was as though the world of Universal Language had commuted to the lobby of Marrakech’s Es Saadi Palace Hotel where we met the Canadian filmmaker, along with his writers-actors Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati (who plays the guide Massoud), for an exclusive one-on-one conversation for 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 visuality, 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 very 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 and tell you that you're not there, you're somewhere else. You're in this third space. The production design was always about creating this third space. We worked with Louisa Schabas, who is a brilliant Montreal-based production designer. We all worked with her very closely, including the Director of Photography Isabelle Stachtchenko. It was about creating a circle of communication between all the departments, which was this very Iran-o—Quebec-o—Winnipeg-ua kind of crew, and keeping them all in this. The production design emerged very much out of that spirit of collaboration.
So do I assume that the time you spent writing the film, would be similar to the time spent in visualising it?
Some of the scenes were not even exactly written. They were drawn. I love to draw, I love to do storyboards, and I tried in this to commit to a very limited mise en scene and a limited way of covering the actions. I didn't want to shoot too much in the day, in part because we had child actors. Also, we were shooting on 16 mm. You have to commit: this is what we're gonna do. On one day we only did two shots. They were elaborate shots, but there were only two of them.
Sometimes you want to shoot from all angles, and then you figure out how the film is when you edit it. But I didn't want to do that. I wanted to commit and so I did very elaborate drawings. It was good to have a map. In a strange way, by mapping things out very clearly, we were also left with room for spontaneous stuff. And a lot of spontaneous things happened while we were filming. There were scenes that weren't in the script that we found. So, there was this move between intense planning, but also being very open to discovery.
It's very interesting that you storyboard. In India Satyajit Ray used to do it. Of the contemporary Indian filmmakers, I know only one—Dibakar Banerjee—who storyboards…
I think that when shooting in digital, you can just go for it because you can shoot to an unlimited quantity. But I don't like to do that. I like to plan. I feel that when you make a nice plan, you can also leave the plan behind. You have a sense, when you start the day, of how you're going to cover the action, and then when everything changes, you know what you need. I feel that leaves more oxygen for discovery, spontaneity and improvisation.
So these interesting elements that you use—like the turkey running with the specs, the man dressed as a Christmas tree—and the props and objects—like the earmuffs—that have a life of their own, were they always part of your design, or did they emerge out of spontaneity?
The earmuffs we talked about with the costume designer Negar Nemati. We talked a lot with her about the colour palette being very grey and beige but we wanted little flashes of colour. We thought it'd be nice to have Pirouz (as Massoud) wear grey costumes with this ecstatic flash of earmuff fluorescence. It's a little identifier, it stands out. It's like this is an important person to look at. You see Pirouz’s face quite late, but the earmuffs tell you who he is. You know even when you see him from a distance.
The Christmas tree man came from a lady in my neighbourhood, when I was growing up in Winnipeg, who liked to wear Christmas ornaments and was just obsessed with Christmas. She wore a star on her head. She had Christmas objects dangling on her. Sometimes she wore a beard like Santa. In the middle of July she would say Merry Christmas to you. She was a local eccentric, around for a while, and then she vanished. I don't know where she went. The Christmas tree man was a little tribute to her.
But the idea in all this was to have a lot of concern for peripheral meanings, something that I associate with all of the great Iranian masters we are referencing. In the West, the way we film is like a hockey game—you follow the centre of action. That's where the camera is. When I'm speaking, the camera is on me, when you speak, the camera cuts to you. But in a lot of these films the person listening is perhaps more interesting for the camera to look at than the person speaking. What's happening next to the action is more interesting maybe than what's happening in the most dramatic spot. So, there are all these peripheral characters in the movie and peripheral moments, and the idea was to fill them with life, fill them with identity. They're off to the side, but they're often their own story. They're part of a larger context than maybe what we get to see. So, I was trying to give all of these pieces their own life.
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 breath of fresh air—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. A lot of 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 organizing 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 organize 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, in spite of 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, all at the same 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, creating a community where you might imagine enormous solitude and creating 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, in a strange way, the centre of that Venn diagram seems to be Scandinavia. I don't know why. So, Tehran plus Winnipeg equals Helsinki.