Set in a parallel universe in Winnipeg where the languages are Farsi and French, director Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language is a comedy that mines humor from its absurdist scenarios and garners earnest sentiment from the ways it explores how human beings can find genuine connection amidst the most random and nonsensical circumstances. It’s touching to witness characters from the film’s multiple narrative threads cross paths and go their separate ways; each story becomes a way to make Rankin’s Winnipeg feel lived-in and whole.

A teacher (Mani Soleymanlou) earnestly tells the students in his classroom, “When I look at you, I see little hope for human survival.” Two sisters find a 500 Iranian Riel note frozen in the ice and try everything they can to retrieve it. Rankin plays a version of himself here, and he quits his government job in Montreal to return home to care for his mother. Within his Winnipeg, The Twentieth Century director Rankin has constructed a dance floor of sorts for his characters to go in and out of each other’s lives; witnessing these dynamics is a testament to the ways we can find grace and connection in the most unlikely of spaces. 

This oscillation between absurdity and sincerity was Rankin’s goal from the start. “The absurdity is the throughline. We are an amalgam of all things, the divine, banal, and everything in between,” he shared. During the Chicago International Film Festival, where Universal Language screened, The Spool spoke with Rankin in person about embracing the inherent artifice of filmmaking, the joys of artistic collaboration with children, and exploring the juxtaposition between the fluidity of the film’s characters and the rigidity of their surroundings. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Winnipeg, Québec, and Iranian cinema have shaped you as a creative director. I’d love to hear how you combined all these influences, places, and stories into this film. 

Long story short, I grew up in Winnipeg and was involved with the Winnipeg Film Group, where I learned about filmmaking. I loved the National Film Board of Canada; Guy Maddin and  Richard Condie are some early influences. Then, I went to Quebec for a university and ended up studying Quebec history. I fell in love with and connected with Quebec cinema. When I was a teenager, a friend introduced me to Iranian Cinema. Her family was from Iran, and she took me to Taste of Cherry, my entry point. Those films just exerted great power over me, and I went deep with them. I had this fantasy as a young person starting to study film in Iran to study with these masters.

I was a very naive 20-year-old, but I went to Iran on a fact-finding mission to see if that would be possible. It didn’t work out, but I met many amazing people and walked away with amazing friendships. That set me on this course to learn Farsi and to dialogue with Iran. My life through art is through friendship. I made Universal Language with some of my very close friends, many of whom are from Iran initially, and this set me on course to have this dialogue between these three influential spheres of cinema. 

It seems your friendships have been more formative to your creative process than any formal schooling you’ve done. 

That’s exactly right. Every time you make a film, you’re learning how to see. This movie was a learning experience for everyone I worked with; we were learning to see through this prismatic perspective on the world.

On that theme of “seeing,” so much of this film deals with the tension of isolation and community and how those intersect. I think about the film’s opening scene, where you focus on this loud and rowdy classroom, but it also feels distant and cold in how you frame that busyness. Can you talk about building that cinematic language of isolation amidst community? 

The film works through a few different themes, moods, and contrasts. One of those themes is that of great solitude and community; another is the juxtaposition between great distance and close proximity. The images incarnate all these ideas through this movement between the rigid and fluid. For example, just taking the first shot is a very brutal structure. These uninviting walls define this school, and you have these little windows in it, mainly bricks and concrete. Yet even if you’re looking at this scene and it feels rigid, something very fluid is moving through the sound. It can move through the wall, and this freedom is something we play with throughout the movie. It’s all part of the philosophical design of this idea that we create these very rigid boundaries and structures, and that’s how we try to organize our lives and the world. But as humans living our lives, we flow between those certainties. 

An aspect of the film that underscores this idea of fluidity is that this parallel universe you’ve crafted feels very lived in. You hint at a lot of backstories that don’t get expanded upon, like the “Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958.” For your world, did you consciously build out these ideas and backstory?

The absurdity is the throughline. The idea of putting Iranian cinema into this Venn diagram with Winnipeg cinema is absurd, but it’s also beautiful. Then again, that’s also the lives we live. We are an amalgam of all things: the divine, banal, and everything in between. The movie does play the divine and the banal a lot, and that’s where the humor emerges. Writing this between Pirouz, Ila, and myself was very conversational. We wrote a story but left a lot open while filming to discover ideas on the fly. The humor manifests how we relate to each other as friends; what you see on-screen is everything we find funny. 

Not to keep ruminating on that opening scene, but the insults lobbed towards the kids were peak absurdity. 

They were all very precocious, bright, and focused. When you work with kids, you must parent and care for them. You must create a positive environment because a film set can be a brutal space. When kids are involved, too, you have to be sure this will be fun for them; it can’t be something that will be competitive or stressful. Coming in with those guidelines in mind meant we could relate to them all as peers. They’re bright and prefer to talk to us as adults. They were also all interested in the craft of filmmaking. Rojina Esmaeili, who plays Negin, was always right next to me when she wasn’t on-screen, looking at the monitor and asking me questions. There’s this whole myth about how you shouldn’t make films with cars, kids, or turkeys, but the kids were great and fun to collaborate with; they understood the inherent humor of the scenes they were in. 

Typically, people figure out that it’s funny pretty fast when I show it. I watched the film with a crowd in my hometown of Montreal recently, and during this scene, the room was utterly silent. They did not figure out it was funny, and I was thinking, “Wow, if you don’t see the humor here, then this is just child abuse.” (laughs) 

A prophet is always without honor in his hometown. 

That’s the thing about humor, though. What’s funny to us is always our worst expression. It’s anger, frustration, stupidity, lust, hubris. … all of these things are hilarious because they’re the most hopeless expression of us. 

Your film also challenges this notion of “authenticity” because it shades this narrative with absurdist elements. How did you balance embracing absurdity and cultivating the real emotions of your characters?  

I wanted Universal Language to be a sincere movie. It’s fundamentally about connection in all of its absurdity. There are absurd, beautiful, ironic, and strange ways in which we’re connected and disconnected. That was always baked into the design of this project. Yet just because you’re sincere doesn’t mean you can’t be silly. I don’t think you have to be solemn to be serious. Humor, in many ways, can be very warm, sincere, and loving. 

The idea was to create an actual brain expressing itself personally through the prism of this thing we were making. The director is a necessary point of synthesis of these differing voices, perspectives, and experiences. Still, a movie only comes to life–even when you’re making something as abstract and artificial as this movie–when all the collaborators express themselves. 

That ties in some ways with you being in this project, too, not just as a director but as a character. 

It’s about me being a participant with everybody else. It’s part of movie-making being a collective maneuver. It’s not just me making images; it’s all of us making images together, which involves people making images of me. We’re all in this kind of prism together. That was sort of the spirit under which the film was made.

For creatives who choose to depict their family baggage on-screen, I always wonder if any trepidation or worry goes into their depiction. 

I do ask myself these questions. There’s an immense gulf between the image of a person and who that person is. It’s always artificial. Despite our efforts through time, cinema has never been an adequate simulacrum. We’ve always been worming around the artifices and trying to avoid them. We get into this mindset: “It’s bad when we see the artifice, and it’s good when we don’t see it because then it becomes credible and authentic, and we forget that it’s the movie … it’s the absolute truth.” But we all know that it’s not; it’s always going to be a space playing another space, a person playing another person, and even sometimes day plays night. I’ve always believed that those artifices have expressive power. There’s something that you can do by embracing the artifice, which can kind of elevate cinematic language. I do not consider myself a filmmaker who works in the realm of realism. Myself in this film … it is an image of myself. It is me, but it also isn’t me. It’s a version of me. It’s a real person fed through the prism of cinematic language. 

Speaking of that artifice, I think now of that scene where we see snow in the film, but you’ve mentioned that winter is an extinct season there right now. 

Winnipeg is an essential contributor to the Hallmark movement. They’ve made a lot of Christmas movies there, and I’ve learned that Christmas only has to be inside the frame. Outside the frame, it can be a sunny day. That scene we shot in the cemetery was during these five days of unseasonably hot weather in the middle of February. The snow melted, so we had to conserve the snow for that scene. It dictated how we would frame things. We had to bring in snow. 

That’s what’s interesting, you know? What we did was not authentic. Authenticity would have been that it’s four days of warmth, so the snow melted in the puddles and spaces we were shooting. There’s always a cheat involved, and being brazen about the cheat and artifice can open up new forms of image-making. 

I’d love to hear about what it was like to scout locations for this film … in particular, how you found so many variations on brutalist architecture for your backdrops. 

The production designer, Louisa Schabas, and the director of photography, Isabelle Stachtchenko, spent much time researching. A lot of the buildings I had grown up being obsessed with. The idea of making it an overwhelmingly brutalist world was one to tie into this idea that we might organize the world into these rigid walls, but as people, we flow between them. 

If you’re in Chicago for longer, you should see the Marina City Apartment Complexes here; they might provide inspiration if you want to do another project featuring brutalist architecture. 

That’s great. Winnipeg plays Chicago in a lot of Hollywood films. Walking around Chicago, I kind of feel it. 

Universal Language opens in theaters Feb. 14, via Oscilloscope Laboratories.