winnipeg

Manitoban director Matthew Rankin is an alchemist, who along with his friend and mentor, Guy Maddin reshapes Winnipeg into a mythic place they can reconfigure through dialogue with lost cinematic traditions. His previous film, The Twentieth Century, was an imagined biography of Canada’s longest serving Prime Minister Mackenzie King, stylised somewhere between a peek-a-boo pre-code silent and a Soviet era propaganda film. Universal Language starts a conversation with Iranian film, especially that of Abbas Kiarostami in the late 1970s to the mid 1980s.