When Winnipeg Met Tehran: An Interview with Matthew Rankin about Universal Language (Web Exclusive)
by Edward Frumkin

Matthew Rankin’s sophomore feature, Universal Language, is a seismic departure from the Winnipeg auteur’s previous oeuvre. His earlier films, such as his short Tesla World Light (2017) and debut feature The Twentieth Century (2019), deployed maximal formalism that is reminiscent of his hometown’s cinema icon Guy Maddin. While Rankin continues his signature absurdist and fanciful elements in Universal Language, he would not label it as minimalism. “My brain is not wired for minimalism. So, it became sort of a maximalist film in a minimalist form,” Rankin told Cineaste over a Zoom call.

Turkeys and tour guide Massoud (portrayed by coscreenwriter Pirouz Nemati) connect the film’s bifurcated narrative. The first storyline consists of schoolmates Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) searching for ways to retrieve money stuck in frozen ice. The second tale consists of a fictional version of Rankin returning to Winnipeg and discovering the state of his family home. Channeling the Iranian cinema luminaries Abbas Kiastroiami, Sohrab Shahid-Saless, and Jafar Panahi, Rankin and cowriters Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi imbue a humanist lens that unites the denizens together with a surreal touch. Though Rankin asserts that the film has no political intent, traces of the affordable housing crisis and mass immigration stemming from the Justin Trudeau administration are present for those familiar with Canada’s sociopolitics. Nevertheless, Rankin discerns that the geopolitical background in Canada provides an entry point to the story and a sigh of relief over the issues that divide communities.—Edward Frumkin

Cineaste: Besides the well-documented Guy Maddin, which other Winnipeg filmmakers inspired you? What was the filmmaking scene there like when you at least started making films, and how has that grown with Universal Language?

Rankin: Guy is the Queen Bee for certain, but there is a whole host of oddball filmmakers in Winnipeg. I really love John Paizs’s first feature Crime Wave [1985] and his short film Springtime in Greenland [1981], which was a particularly important influence on Universal Language. Another Winnipeg filmmaker I really love is John Paskievich, who directed the documentary short Ted Baryluk’s Grocery [1982]; it’s a flat-out masterwork of Winnipeg cinema and I love Paskievich’s compassionate sense of the absurd. He was also a street photographer who walked all over Winnipeg in the Seventies and Eighties and snapped thousands of photographs which we referred to again and again while making the movie. The costume designer Negar Nemati drew inspiration from the Paskievich photos because she said she wasn’t exactly sure how Winnipeggers dressed themselves, and the photographs are a vivid depiction of Winnipeg's very eccentric style.

Richard Condie’s film The Big Snit [1985] is maybe one of the first Winnipeg films I ever saw, and I felt like I recognized my city while watching that movie. It’s a movie about a pathological Scrabble game between an elderly couple arguing over banal nothingness while, unbeknownst to them, a nuclear war breaks out outside of their house. That particular tension between the divine and the ridiculous, the sacred and the profane, the utopian and the apocalyptic is, to me, extremely funny and extremely Winnipeg. And it’s a tension you can trace through generations of Winnipeg filmmakers right to today with Rhayne Vermette, Jaimz Asmundson, Ryan Steel. I really love that community of filmmakers, and I still feel very close to it, even though I haven’t lived in Winnipeg for a long time. It’s a very punk-rock, counterculture, flamboyantly weird independent film scene which is radically defiant of the North American mainstream. But, of course, it exists alongside another, much more corporate and conformist strain of industrial filmmaking. I believe, in fact, that Winnipeg is the world capital of the Hallmark Movement in Cinema.

Cineaste: Like Hallmark movies?

Rankin: Yes, I like to call it a movement. Canada produces something like 200,000 Christmas movies for Hallmark per year so, factually, it’s kind of the most prolific movement in contemporary Canadian cinema. Most of them are filmed in Winnipeg throughout the year, even at the height of summer. I took some important lessons from the Hallmark Movement, in fact, while directing Universal Language because it’s now becoming more and more dangerous to film in winter. There were times during the shoot when it became nerve-wrackingly warm, and the snow threatened to melt completely. Winter, as a season, is something of an endangered weather system in the age of climate change, but that will not discourage the Hallmark Movement one bit. They know that it only needs to be Christmas time inside the frame. Outside the frame it can be a sweltering summer day in Winnipeg, but inside the frame it’s a snowy day in Christmastown, Vermont. So, there were a few warm winter days where we put that wisdom into practice.

Cineaste: You went to Tehran in 2001, attempted to enroll at the Makhmalbaf film school, and have learned Farsi. What got you interested in Iranian culture and cinema?

Rankin: I had an Iranian friend when I was a teenager, and she took me to see Where Is the Friend’s House? There was a Kiarostami retrospective at the local cinema, and I had never seen films like those. It really set something off in my brain and I went deep into the work of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Sohrab Shahid-Saless, and Jafar Panahi—all the great masters of Iranian poetic cinema. Iranian cinema is very vast, of course, and today, it’s a very different set of preoccupations which inspire filmmakers and animate their work. But in the Seventies and Eighties, there was a kind of metaphysical poetry coming out of the Kanoon Institute, and these were films that touched my heart very deeply. I’ve told this story a zillion times, but there was this incident in my grandmother’s childhood where she found a $2 bill frozen in the ice on the street. This small incident in her life felt very much like the kind of story you would find in one of these Kanoon-style films about the lives of children.

I’m a person who lives with great idealistic longing and the transformative power of cinema to connect across great distances is something which appeals to me. As a young, naive filmmaker starting out, I traveled to Iran with the hope that I could study at Makhmalbaf Film House. But when I arrived, I found the film school had already closed, and Makhmalbaf had left the country. So that put an end to my dream very swiftly, But I met a lot of great people and my time there set me on the course of my life, having this dialogue with Iranian cinema. It was when I started to learn Farsi—and, of course, I am still learning it. It set me on a path to meeting and ultimately collaborating with Pirouz Nemati, Ila Firouzabadi, and Sylvain Corbeil making this film together.

Cineaste: Is Tehran where you meet screenwriters Ila and Pirouz?

Rankin: I met Pirouz through [producer] Sylvain, around 2011 or something like that. He and I shared a love for the same films, and we hit it off right away. He and Ila have become two of my very closest friends in the world and in many ways the film emerged very organically out of that friendship. I describe it as “Looking for Tehran in Winnipeg and Looking for Winnipeg in Tehran,” which was very much the process of making it—that is, my encounter of Tehran moves overwhelmingly through the prism of my friends. And, similarly, my friends encounter Winnipeg through me. It’s very normal for us to live between these two spaces in the space we share together. Often in our geopolitics, in our nationalisms, in the binaries and oppositions we use to organize the world, we imagine Tehran and Winnipeg as two places very distant from each other. In our friendships, however, closeness is the most normal thing. We interweave, overlap, and crossfade in absurd, bizarre, improbable, beautiful, and loving ways as we become part of each other’s lives. Our film is very much an expression of that.

Cineaste: History and mythologies converge in your films. For example, in your shorts Tesla World Light and The Twentieth Century, you take artistic liberties in your fantasy depictions of William King and Nikola Tesla. In Universal Language, you present some historical facts about Winnipeg while painting your own fictional portrait of it. Please delve into your research process to bring your characters to life.

Rankin: I am trained as a historian. At university, I studied history and was on a path to becoming an academic. I gave that up. I have a lot of curiosity about things, and I love learning, but I concluded that my interest in history was an artistic one as opposed to a scientific one. When you’re an academic, you must be a scientist or, at least, you must have the pretense of being a scientist. Because organizing the raw chronology of time— into a beginning, a middle, and an end with a cast of characters and events to which you attribute meaning—is essentially an artistic process, even if historians try to be as scientific as possible. The arc of cinema history is driven by a similar impulse to create a simulacrum, to contrive a reality that is so credible, so seemingly “authentic” that we wouldn’t doubt it.

But, of course, it’s always fake. Whatever “truth” we contrive involves a skillful manipulation of artifice. We bend the natural world to our artificial structure. It’s always a person playing another person. A city playing another city. In the Hallmark canon, the summer performs as winter. Even sometimes the day performs as the night! Anyway, as someone who is trained in history, I am very alert to this. To me, it’s very interesting to undermine the simulacrum and make our imaginative engagement with history as blatantly obvious as possible. I’m interested in historical phenomena that cannot be measured by scientific history: feelings and emotions, moods and dreams. So, I like to be very up front about that. The biopic form is one that interests me greatly and I like to be extremely up front about the artificial nature of making a film. I feel like embracing the artifices of cinema, rather than avoiding them, opens new doors of expression and the possibility of making new images.

Cineaste: I think so much about the title card (e.g. the presentation for the Winnipeg Youth and Children) in Universal Language, as well as some of your shorts. This is also partly because Iranian cinema has been approved by the Ministry of Culture. How do you blend your experience working with the  short films with the Canadian government and Iranian cinema in that title card?

Rankin: That’s a little artifact of the Kanoon Institute, the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. It is a very governmental-sounding name, which is fun. Canada is also a very bureaucratic culture. And I love governmental formalism. I worked at the National Parks for one year, making what were essentially fine-art promotional films. There is something about the boringness of the Canadian government aesthetic that fascinates me. The way an otherwise sublime natural landscape will appear once it has been fed through the beige prism of a bureaucratic cubicle is very funny to me. The humor at work in Universal Language is exploring exactly that tension, walking a fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous. You don’t necessarily think of government filmmaking as work of art, but they nonetheless involve a host of aesthetic decisions at work which are quite enchanting.

I feel the same way about the two TV commercials in the film: one for furniture and the other one for turkeys. Those are very much inspired by low-budget, hard-sell local TV commercials made in Winnipeg in the 1980s. I think of them as subconscious art forms. These furniture salesmen didn’t think of themselves as video artists. And yet there is a sophisticated set of aesthetic rules governing their work. It’s a singular cinematic language that delights me to no end. What I love most is cinematic language.

Cineaste: The Twentieth Century and your shorts are more formalistic, while Universal Language is minimalist. How are you trying to channel that banality in your aesthetic choices for the film.

Rankin: When I was putting together the storyboard and the shots for The Twentieth Century, I had imagined something with a lot of cutting. But I don’t think there was ever even one day during the shoot when I managed to shoot all the shots on my list. Before that, I had always made films with a very small group of my close friends, and we would just shoot until we had all the shots. With The Twentieth Century I was thrust into a more industrial way of working and I had to adapt. So, when it came time to make Universal Language, I was excited about reducing the number of shots to an almost elemental minimalism. There were a couple days where we just did two shots in the day—they were difficult shots, but only two of them. And I didn’t really leave a lot of room for myself to cut the scenes in different ways. We barely shot anything for the sake of “coverage.” I figured out in the storyboards how the action was going to be filmed, and then I really committed to that. I didn’t give myself any ways to wiggle out of it in the editing room.

This stripped-down approach also left room for spontaneous discovery. Lots of times we had a bit of time to just get dreamy and follow ideas as they emerged on set.

This was also my effort to make a minimalist film. I wouldn’t really describe Universal Language as minimalism in the end. Of course, it’s a slower-moving, quieter film without any fast cuts or big visceral events—except maybe the turkey—but it is nonetheless extremely dense. There is a lot happening, even if “nothing happens.” So, my brain is just not wired for minimalism. It’s a maximalist film in a minimalist form.

Cineaste: In an interview with the Toronto Film Critics Association, you said you never set out to make a political statement. Yet, you are lightly responding to the affordable housing crisis in Canada and the many immigrants entering the country. How did these events during the Justin Trudeau administration influence your film?

Rankin: No influence at all. Also, if I may, the housing crisis of which you speak is entirely the result of corporate greed. But our movie has no political agenda. Politics is about making the world simple and I think art is the one place where the world can really be complex. It’s why ideologues attack artists, in fact. The film is playing with the autobiographical form, the idea of the diary film. It’s drawing upon my life, my parents, my friends, the city I grew up in. So, the story comes, first and foremost from a personal place.

But, of course, I made this film with a great big family of people who I love very much and so it becomes our story. Ila and Pirouz and I share common humor, feelings about the purpose of art and hope for the world. Our movie is not beholden to any structure, Canadian, Iranian, or otherwise. We think of it as a movie with no borders that speaks to a wider, deeper idea of human belonging than our political structures typically allow. We are aware of the current political moment we are living through. It’s cruel and mean. It is predicated on amplifying oppositions, cleaving the world into winners and losers, antagonizing everyone into binary factions. But life, as we live it, isn’t like that. It’s infinitely more fluid and more complex.

Our movie works from the notion that an in-between space, between realities, can possibly be a loving and nurturing home. I think this is true of a lot of peoples’ lives. Certainly, it is something that people who have migrated between states can really relate to. And I think that’s why people have found some catharsis in watching our movie. We’ve become very lonesome since the pandemic and spaces of community, solidarity, and support have really collapsed in a troubling way. On all ends of the political spectrum. It pains me to say it, but I do think that making a kind, gentle, intercultural movie in our current political landscape is something of a subversive gesture.

Cineaste: Universal Language is very Winnipeg, as you said. Did you have any concerns that it would not connect with other audiences?

Rankin: I never really think about that too much. You never know how a thing will connect. Even huge Hollywood studios with all their money, their focus groups, and their distribution budgets, they don’t know how a thing will connect. So, you just need to be sincere. When you do something very sincerely with your whole heart, you have a good chance of connecting with other hearts. And I think that that’s the pleasure of watching a movie. Before I ever set foot in Brooklyn, for example, I knew a lot about Brooklyn from watching movies. As we know there are a ton of details particular to Brooklyn which might go over my head. But that’s okay! I think the pleasure of watching a movie is being thrown into a world that is precisely defined, and you must figure it out and look for patterns. I just watched Succession. Have you watched that show?

Cineaste: Yes, I’ve seen the first few seasons.

Rankin: I don’t understand at least fifty percent of what’s going on in that show. I have zero knowledge about corporate machinations and how they work. But here you are thrown into that world. You’re observing patterns and seeing characters emerge, even if only Rupert Murdoch will really understand all the references. There’s a space for you to enter. When you go very specific, you can penetrate the universal. And we made our movie with that conviction.

There are of course some little references in the film which Farsi speakers will have the fullest pleasure of identifying. There are certain lines in French you can’t really translate. So French speakers will have extra pleasure in those moments. And yes, there are little narcotic sprinklings for the citizens of Winnipeg also. But nothing hinges on any of that. It’s just details of world-building and it’s an invitation.

Cineaste: Universal Language was a return to Winnipeg to a degree. How did you use the film to get back to your upbringing?

Rankin: I haven’t lived there in a long time. My parents were lifelong Winnipeg residents, but I have now lived more than half my life in Montréal. So, my relationship with Winnipeg is a little bit tenuous, though I do often return to renew my neurotic affiliations. It’s where the world began for me and wherever the world begins is a point of great existential pressure, I think. And when your parents die and you become an orphan, your relationship to the place you grew up undergoes a transformation. My mother died at the very beginning of the first lockdown in 2020 and I walked through all the familiar streets I grew up on and so many ghosts wafted through me.

The Christmas Tree Man in the film is not, in fact, a brazen tribute to the Hallmark Movement but is based on a lady who lived nearby when I was growing up who always dressed in Christmas ornaments. She wore an angel or a star on her head, her arms wrapped in a shawl of tinsel, she would wish you “Merry Christmas” in the middle of July. I was fascinated by this lady when I was a kid, and it was such a wondrous event to encounter her on the street. So, the film is negotiating my feelings and my memory of that city. It’s a return home. A lot of Canadian films are structured around the idea of returning home or leaving home. Our movie extrapolates upon that trope, expanding the idea of what home and belonging can mean. I think when you look at a familiar space from an unfamiliar angle, you see the world in a new way and a new familiarity is born.

Cineaste: Are there any films about staying in Canada?

Rankin: Well, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg [2007] is kind of about that, right? He’s trying to leave, but he can’t. It’s like Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel [1962]. Certainly, there is no shortage of official voices, like any Instagram story published by the Winnipeg Tourism Board, telling you that Winnipeg is absolutely perfect, and you should never, ever leave it. But, of course, those films have an agenda.

The Twentieth Century and Universal Language are distributed in the United States by Oscilloscope.

Edward Frumkin is a Brooklyn-based culture writer whose bylines include IndieWire, The Daily Beast, BOMB Magazine, Interview Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 3