Although snow-covered Winnipeg, capital of the Canadian province of Manitoba, has a lively community of exiled Iranians, the current film re-release Universal Language still leaves you amazed. In the second full-length film by Matthew Ranking (The Twentieth Century), all the residents of the city of 705,244 people speak Farsi and in general people think they are more in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s than in today’s Canada.
This may seem a bit strange. You really enjoy spending your time with the quirky people from this Winnipeg, for example a primary school child who dresses up as comedy legend Groucho Marx every day. Even if it unfortunately didn’t work out with an Oscar nomination for the film submitted.
Universal Language is full of bizarre stories that are nested within each other
One thing is certain: there is no shortage of Universal Language Bizarre. For example, the tour guide Massoud (Pirouz Nemati) leads a tourism group to non-sights such as a road intersection. And what’s more, a 500 rial bill (the currency in Iran) locked under the ice sends the two elementary school children Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) on their very own odyssey, during which they meet, among other things, a singing turkey dealer.
At the same time, a former government official from Quebec travels to visit his sick mother. Yes, just as we think about it special look of the film Between 16mm nostalgia and rigid geometric image settings, the returnee also has to warm up to his hometown and its residents again.
Winnipeg was already the setting for a more than idiosyncratic film in 2007
Fans of offbeat cinema may know the Canadian city from Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg from 2007 – a somnambulistic fake documentary full of surreal tips. If you want to take a closer look at this place’s very own film culture, you should definitely take a look at it. Instead of surrealism, there is more of a style in Ranking’s film magical realismeven if these two artistic movements often flow into one another.
The reality-distorting aspect of Universal Language therefore does not slam into the tangible in quite as powerful a manner as it does in Surrealism. Rather, the dreamlike nature is naturally embedded in the reality of the city and its residents. A man in one of the film’s highlight scenes wearing a Christmas tree as an outfitis therefore not perceived as unusual. He is one of the many things that are as funny as they are mundane and inexplicable in this charming film.
Here is the trailer for Universal Language:
Universal Language – Trailer (German subtitles) HD
Universal Language is Ranking’s love letter to his hometown and the culture and cinema of Iran
Inspired by the films of Iranian directors such as Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up) and Jafar Panahi (Taxi Tehran), Rankin traveled to Iran as a young man to study film there. In the end it didn’t work, he told Filmmaker Magazine in an interview. But his love for Iranian culture and the local cinema remained. Like the films of its Iranian counterparts, Universal Language is full of poetry that eludes the everyday.
Some Iranians may even laugh self-deprecatingly at the overly polite behavior of some characters, which is common in Iran Taarof calls. It can happen that the taxi driver doesn’t want any money or you are invited to a feast at night. What are mere polite phrases in the real world become a lived reality in Universal Language. Anyone who is not very familiar with Iranian culture will probably miss this insider gag. But everyone can have fun with the absurd situations that arise from this.
Universal Language has been running in German cinemas since January 23, 2025.