Universal Language - Expat Cinema Rotterdam
This film is part of Previously Unreleased 2025
An absurd, surrealist-tinged comedy by Canadian director Matthew Rankin (The Twentieth Century) connects present-day Winnipeg, Canada, with 1990s Tehran. Wes Anderson meets Abbas Kiarostami in Rankin’s ode to Iranian cinema, artfully blending dream and reality.
Introverted civil servant Matthew (played by Rankin himself) leaves Montreal to visit his ailing mother in Winnipeg. But will he ever truly arrive in his hometown? Once there, he finds that everyone in the isolated Canadian metropolis speaks Farsi. Drawn into the quest of two children searching for a pair of glasses, Matthew also encounters guide Massoud, who leads a bewildered group of tourists past the monuments and historic sites of “Winnipeg.”
In Universal Language, what is “real” and what is “imagined” becomes impossible to tell apart—just as in the works of celebrated Iranian filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, both of whom Rankin deeply admires. In such a world, a long-lost briefcase left on a park bench can be declared UNESCO World Heritage, and a “storage facility for Kleenex tissues” can serve as a landmark.
Matthew Rankin’s second feature—after a career directing short films and music videos—fuses the absurd worlds of Wes Anderson with the dreamlike lyricism of Iranian cinema in a wholly original mix. The film is both a love letter to Iranian culture and a meditation on the undefined mental landscape of Canada, that vast geographical giant.
- 19:00
Kies tijdstip
- filmspecial
This film is part of Previously Unreleased 2025
An absurd, surrealist-tinged comedy by Canadian director Matthew Rankin (The Twentieth Century) connects present-day Winnipeg, Canada, with 1990s Tehran. Wes Anderson meets Abbas Kiarostami in Rankin’s ode to Iranian cinema, artfully blending dream and reality.
Introverted civil servant Matthew (played by Rankin himself) leaves Montreal to visit his ailing mother in Winnipeg. But will he ever truly arrive in his hometown? Once there, he finds that everyone in the isolated Canadian metropolis speaks Farsi. Drawn into the quest of two children searching for a pair of glasses, Matthew also encounters guide Massoud, who leads a bewildered group of tourists past the monuments and historic sites of “Winnipeg.”
In Universal Language, what is “real” and what is “imagined” becomes impossible to tell apart—just as in the works of celebrated Iranian filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, both of whom Rankin deeply admires. In such a world, a long-lost briefcase left on a park bench can be declared UNESCO World Heritage, and a “storage facility for Kleenex tissues” can serve as a landmark.
Matthew Rankin’s second feature—after a career directing short films and music videos—fuses the absurd worlds of Wes Anderson with the dreamlike lyricism of Iranian cinema in a wholly original mix. The film is both a love letter to Iranian culture and a meditation on the undefined mental landscape of Canada, that vast geographical giant.
