Amidst the London Film Festival’s lineup of films steeped in despair and bleak visions of the future – like swamps pulling their characters deeper into hopelessness – Universal Language stood out as a clever, kind, and playful exception. Throbbing with youthful energy, the film reflects a fresh voice, not only through its characters but also in its form and attitude, marking a significant moment as the second feature by director Matthew Rankin. This vitality is evident in its inventive engagement with the history of cinema – particularly Iranian cinema – as well as its dialogue with national and contemporary cinematic traditions. Rankin blends these influences with a deeply personal perspective, creating a peculiar yet emotionally resonant cinematic landscape. 

The world of Universal Language brims with sincerity and kindness, radiating an atmosphere of hope and connection. Inspired by the generosity often associated with Iranian cinema, this warmth fosters a sense of joy throughout the viewing experience. Yet, in true playful fashion, Rankin tempers this lightness with a subtle dose of melancholy, weaving cinematic citations, humour, and heartfelt authenticity into a nuanced exploration of humanity’s complexity.

A filmmaker who thrives on experimenting with the medium, Rankin’s innovative approach is evident in his extensive repertoire of short films, where animation, sound, and narrative intertwine seamlessly to explore diverse subjects, from Nikola Tesla in The Tesla World Light (2017) to Canadian war heroes in Mynarski Death Plummet (2014). In one of his recent shorts, Municipal Relaxation Module (2022), he managed to captivate audiences with nothing more than voice messages and empty benches.

Rankin’s debut feature film, The Twentieth Century (2019), builds on themes explored in his short films, offering an unconventional and personal take on history. While comparisons to fellow Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin are inevitable, Rankin’s style and approach firmly establish his independence. Both filmmakers share a penchant for non-realist, studio-based settings and stylistic innovation, but their artistic sensibilities lead to distinct outcomes.

Rankin’s work engages directly with history, reimagining it subversively through exaggeration, fantasy, and humour. In The Twentieth Century, he uses historical inaccuracies to critique Canadian history and politics, focusing on the early 20th century and a fictionalised prime ministerial election. The central figure is William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, who led during critical moments such as World War II. However, Rankin shifts King’s historical context to the Boer War era, merging timelines to explore Canada’s conflicting pro-British and anti-war tendencies. This approach highlights the persistent tension between English- and French-Canadian perspectives across the century.

The Twentieth Century, credit: Voyelles Films

Stylistically, the film blends live-action with animation and painting, a method derived from Rankin’s earlier work and influenced by figures like Karel Zeman. This technique evokes a fabricated and minimalist historical vision, with geometric, modernist-inspired designs creating vast icy landscapes and stylised interiors. The decision to shoot on film adds thematic depth, capturing a 20th-century essence through a medium of the same era.

The film’s humour and satirical edge emerge in its strange character dynamics and exaggerated behaviours. King’s lack of charisma and his ambivalence toward war are symbolised by his unconventional sexual desires and Oedipal attachment to his mother. His romantic pursuits, torn between Ruby (the Governor General’s daughter) and Ernestine (his mother’s French-Canadian nurse), mirror Canada’s peace-versus-war dichotomy. Both women disappear after aiding King, leaving him alone and retreating to his mother, a metaphor for Canada’s lingering British influence. King’s symbolic raising of the Canadian flag underscores this loyalty, even as his journey reflects his passivity and despair.

Rankin incorporates gender reversals and surreal elements as part of the film’s parodic tone. Ernestine represents Ernest Lapointe, a French-Canadian advisor to the real King, reimagined as a self-sacrificing nurse. King’s mother is played by Louis Negin, emphasising the absurdity of the relationships. Other characters, like the ornithologist Joseph Israel Tarte and the authoritarian Lord Muto, add layers of humour and critique. Casting an Asian actor as the doctor addressing King’s sexuality references the real King’s anti-Asian policies, including Japanese Canadian internment during World War II.

The Twentieth Century, credit: Voyelles Films

Through its hybrid storytelling and bold experimentation, The Twentieth Century establishes Rankin as a distinctive auteur. The film’s intricate blend of satire, history, and artistry marks a successful transition to feature filmmaking, leaving audiences eager for Rankin’s future work.

Universal Language reflects Rankin’s innovative approach to cinema, his deep affection for his hometown of Winnipeg, and, most strikingly, his profound admiration for Iranian cinema. The influence of legendary Iranian filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Sohrab Shahid-Saless is palpable throughout the film.

Thanks to its anti-realist tendencies, Rankin has always presented a cinema of alternatives, just like Maddin. With Universal Language, he expands his alternative rendition beyond the sphere of history and takes it into a new direction which involves reimagining geography – Winnipeg – and by extension a whole nation through the prism of a personal fascination with another culture.

Set in Canada, the story follows a man searching for solace, a soothing hand, and the warmth of seeing his mother. Yet, in this uniquely imagined locale, everything exudes the essence of Iranian culture. From the language – everyone speaks Farsi – to the grocery stores and restaurants serving Iranian dishes, the entire setting is imbued with Iranian cultural elements, sounds, and spirit. This delightful fusion transforms Universal Language into a love letter to cinema and culture, blending nostalgia, innovation, and warmth into a singularly uplifting experience.

Universal Language, credit: Aziz Zoromba

Starting with a modified logo of The Institute for the intellectual development of Children and Young Adults, also known by its abbreviated Farsi name Kanoon, Universal Language pays explicit tribute to the films produced at this Iranian centre. Established in the late ‘60s under the aegis of the government, Kanoon remained in the ‘70s – and to some degrees in the ‘80s – one of the most influential and productive hubs of cultural activities in contemporary Iran. Often charting stories of children who persistently pursue small but meaningful quests, Kanoon films from the ‘80s won fans around the world by virtue of simplicity and innocence of their little characters and by appealing to shared human emotions. Indeed their success on the festival circuit reintroduced Iranian cinema globally and shaped a familiar notion of Iranian cinema which somehow bordered on a stereotypical one.

The cultural productions – including films – produced under the banner of Kanoon especially in the ‘70s had a reputation for metaphorically using children’s stories to deliver their disguised message while evading censorship. It can be claimed that Universal Language parallels this double address through change of its narrative course. The children’s story that opens Universal Language and elicits direct comparisons with (now) classics such as Khane-ye doust kodjast? (Where’s the friend’s house?, Abbas Kiarostami, 1987) and Badkonak-e Sefid (The White Balloon, Jafar Panahi, 1995) only constitutes one facet of the film. The plot soon involves grown-up characters whose personal journeys gain equal emotional resonance and let human feelings seep through mundane, sometimes senseless details. Rather than paying a pure homage, Rankin personalises his inspiration sources and livens up his material with dead-pan humour and a keen sense of visual style. Partially shot in Montréal and partially in Winnipeg, the film follows its characters in a snowbound landscape dominated by concrete buildings. The coldness of this alternative realm, somehow amplified by the relatively muted colour palette of the film, belie the warmth running through the film.

Like many Iranians who fall in love with cinema through the rich tradition of Iranian filmmaking before venturing into the works of international masters, the opportunity to converse with a director whose work incorporates Farsi dialogue and Persian cultural elements felt profoundly rewarding. For one of us, who now resides in Canada and even acted in his film, this connection was deeply personal. Rankin, known for his warm and approachable demeanour, graciously agreed to an interview during his travels to screen Universal Language. Amidst a busy schedule, he carved out time to discuss his experimental approach to filmmaking, the stylistic and thematic influences that shape his work, and his enduring admiration for Persian cinema.

Matthew’s genuine kindness and adaptability shone throughout the interview and our subsequent correspondence. As a director who has made the effort to learn Farsi and visit Iran, he always greeted us warmly in Farsi and took care to pronounce Persian names, characters, films, and the film’s Farsi title, Avaz-e Booghalaoon (آواز بوقلمون), meaning “Turkey Gobble,” with precision. This thoughtful gesture set the tone for an engaging and open dialogue that extended far beyond our planned duration, spanning over two hours. His insightful and detailed responses fostered a warm and welcoming atmosphere, inspiring us to explore further into his creative process and filmmaking approach. This thoughtful and engaging exchange led to a 15,000-word transcription, which – with his meticulous revisions – was eventually refined to 11,000 words.

Universal Language, credit: Aziz Zoromba

Universal Language, or Avaz-e Booghalaoon, has been met with global acclaim and was proudly submitted as Canada’s official entry for Best International Feature at the Oscars. The film carries a soul evocative of classic Iranian cinema, offering a hopeful message – something increasingly rare in contemporary narratives – interwoven with the kindness and inventive spirit of Rankin’s experimental approach. It serves as a reflection of its creator’s distinct character, embodying a filmmaker whose presence in modern cinema feels both revitalising and full of promise.

– H.S. & R.S.K.

Watching your films and Guy Maddin’s, we experience a common feeling structurally, thematically, and aesthetically, suggesting it stems from a shared sensibility, almost like a movement. Do you think there’s a sort of ‘Winnipeg movement’/ or sensibility – something related to the place, or a shared source of inspiration like history of cinema?

Yes, I think you can definitely say that. There is a set of obsessions which unite Winnipeg filmmakers, from Guy Maddin to the most obscure outsider artist. Throughout a vast, collective filmography we can trace, broadly speaking, a somewhat overwrought existential relationship with the subject of the city itself, a propensity for weird humour and a repurposing of abstract formalism to tell a personal story. Those are the big tenets of Winnipeg filmmaking.

Winnipeg is full of ironies and irony is kind of the central nervous system of any Winnipeg film, even at its most sincere. I think in a way that irony is rooted in Winnipeg history itself. From its earliest days in the 1870s there has been a real punk rock strain in Winnipeg culture, an impulse to reject the North American mainstream – with all of its lies about money, celebrity, narcissistic glory – and build a new concept of nationality on the Prairies based on the idea of métissage and transnationality. This idea comes directly from the founder of Manitoba, Louis Riel. 

But it is the radical the reworking of cinematic codes to tell a personal story which is Winnipeg’s greatest cinematic obsession. You can see this at work in Universal Language. The film tells my own personal story through the prism of Iranian meta-realism. Though, in another way, I think subverting the codes of cinematic language is also a major preoccupation for all the great Ostad (Persian word for masters) of Iranian cinema as well. You could draw a parallel, for instance, between Noon o Goldoon (A Moment of Innocence, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996) and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg. Both films grapple with memory, blending autobiography with fiction and integrating the filmmaker as character within the narrative. They explore the process of filmmaking as a means to navigate personal history.

Many filmmakers and cinephiles start with exposure to mainstream movies before carving out their unique artistic voices. Could you describe how your relationship with film has evolved, how you developed your distinct cinematic language, and where you draw your inspiration from?

Well, I think a lot of it has to do with how I grew up. I never had much of an interest in mainstream cinema, even as a child. I loved the Marx Brothers growing up – Groucho Marx was an early inspiration for me. I also adored the old silent films: Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Roscoe Arbuckle, and of course, Charlie Chaplin. I think that was my initial spark – the thing that got me excited about cinema.

Collective dreaming in Universal Language, credit: Maryse Boyce

In Iran, our generation which was born a few years before and after revolution, developed a unique relationship with cinema in a very peculiar way, which may, in a very odd way, resemble the way you arrived at your own cinematic taste. Due to bans on video distribution and many Western films, our exposure to cinema was shaped in a very distinctive way. Apart from our national Iranian cinema, silent films, especially comedies, formed an initial connection to the medium. Later, we began to secretly access Western adventure films, animations, and other genres through illegal means.

On television, the selection of films available was curated and limited, but it included selective works by directors like Tarkovsky, Ozu, Kurosawa, Andrzej Wajda, Taviani brothers and others in the arthouse tradition. This created an unusual cinematic education – one rooted in a combination of classic arthouse films and a slow, secret exposure to more diverse filmmakers over time…

I followed a similar trajectory to your own. Despite my very deep internationalist longings I am a very parochial, backwoods person and it really was the local films made in Winnipeg which first alerted me to the fact that films could be more than just entertainment. The first time I can recall recognising my city and its problems in a movie would be The Big Snit, an animated film by Winnipeg Film Group founder Richard Condie. Still today I feel there is no better depiction of Winnipeg. Though I also love Condie’s earlier film on the theme of procrastination, Getting Started. Winnipeggers are renowned procrastinators!

Around that time, in the 1980s, Maddin was also emerging as a director, and I was aware of him even as a child. I remember watching his film Careful when I was quite young, and it made a huge impression on me.

Careful was truly amazing to me. By that point, I already knew a lot about the films it was referencing, like the works of Josef von Sternberg, who I admired even as a kid. Seeing how Maddin reworked those antiquated filmic languages to create something altogether new was incredibly inspiring. 

This journey led me to get involved with the Winnipeg Film Group, an artist-run centre which continues to be a major incubator for Winnipeg filmmakers. I learned a lot there – I learned how to develop film and I began experimenting with animation and abstract filmmaking and this eventually transitioned into making dramatic films. But for me, there’s always been an intense concern for form. I’m a big believer that form should energise function, and vice versa. There should be a dynamic relationship between the two. 

Silent movies have significantly influenced your work, much like they have for Guy Maddin, yet your films also showcase a rich and dynamic soundscape. This blend of silence and sound design contrasts sharply with the visual styles of silent cinema. This is especially evident when comparing The Twentieth Century to Universal Language, where sound becomes a dominant expressive tool.

Your films, such as Mynarski Death Plummet, which is entirely silent, and Cattle Call, where animal auctioneering evolves into a musical experience, demonstrate a keen balance where sound plays a pivotal role… 

Cattle Call is about the extreme speech of auctioneering and [co-director] Mike Maryniuk and I always thought of it as a work of “visual speech” – much like Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart made “visual music,” images that look and move the way music sounds. Sound is often put to extremely utilitarian use in dramatic films, but sound has immense expressive power. One of the things I love in the work of the great Iranian masters is the disconnect between image and sound. For example, you might hear an entire conversation while only seeing the building where it’s happening, or you might see a car in the distance, but hear the sound as if it’s very close. We tried to reference that in our film and even take it further. There are moments where sound literally moves through walls – we start outside, move inside, then back outside. Sometimes you’re hearing both spaces at once, and other times it’s focused on a specific detail. Sound designer Sacha Ratcliffe and I were really experimenting with sound geography and using sound almost the way we use the camera. Even if the camera is still, the sound can pan, move through walls, and shift through space. It was incredibly exciting for us to push the boundaries of sound in that way.

Discussing the influence of Iranian national TV on our generation’s cinematic taste reminded us of your connection to television, as depicted in your film Kubasa in a Glass: The Strange World of the Winnipeg Television Commercial (1975–1993). It appears that television also played a significant role in shaping your creative development.

This project’s intriguing use of repurposed archival footage reminded us of the recent film Eight Postcards from Utopia by Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Radu Jude, which similarly utilises found Romanian advertising footage to explore and convey a range of concepts. Could you share more about Kubasa in a Glass and your approach to working with archival material to explore different ideas?

That was a strange but exhilarating project. My first career was actually as a historian – I trained as an academic historian, and I’ve always loved history and research. The idea of putting history on film, the problems and possibilities of transforming the so-called “real world” into images, has always preoccupied me. I love archives, and many of my early films were archival collages.

This particular project was part of a larger work about Winnipeg television, and I made this around 2006 with the artist and film archivist Walter Forsberg. It involved a lot of collecting, sifting through old VHS tapes to find little relics in them. This was all pre-YouTube. The idea was to create an essay film that would use these old advertisements, mostly unaltered, to construct a portrait of the city. We organised them in a way that told a story about Winnipeg, reflecting its character and history and civic anxieties through its advertisements.

Universal Language, credit: Aziz Zoromba

I think of that film more as an essay than a traditional movie. The idea was to structure these mundane artifacts of commercial media to create an argument about what the city means. We also directly referenced some of these artifacts in the TV commercials featured in Universal Language

Your work spans an incredibly wide spectrum – from Universal Language, which pays homage to Iranian cinema, to Une journée au Parc national Kootenay, admiring musical works Alain Clavier, the Canadian composer. On the other hand, you’ve created character-driven works like Tesla and Mynarski Death Plummet, centred on a Canadian war hero, as well as The Twentieth Century, which explores themes of history, failed utopias, and national identity. Then there’s Municipal Relaxation Module, a short film sparked by a series of phone conversations, showcasing yet another facet of your creativity.

With such varied subjects fuelling your films, what are the main inspirations behind your diverse output?

I am a person with a large cinematic appetite and many forms inspire me. But there are some persistent themes which connect them all. 

I’m fascinated, for example, by failed utopias. I love history, of course, and I’m deeply intrigued by the problems of representing reality on screen. The process of transforming reality into something artificial that pretends to be real – or that has a complicated relationship with reality through the artificial prism of a simulacrum – is something I find endlessly compelling.

Mynarski Death Plummet, credit Voyelles Films

I feel like humour is another way that these films relate to the world. I’m drawn to humour that walks a fine line between the sad and the ridiculous, between the sacred and the profane, the divine and the banal. It’s a tension I find very deeply funny.

Ultimately, what interests me most is the absurdity and beauty of being alive. It’s a very limited and very precious moment – full of irony and tension and beauty – this moment of all being alive together at the same time.

It’s interesting that you mentioned your interest in history. When comparing your approach to filmmaking with that of Guy Maddin, it seems like while Maddin often proposes an alternative geography, you’re focused on crafting an alternative history. This was a fascinating discovery for us, especially as we learned more about your background and how this perspective informs your work. With Universal Language, it feels like you’re also expanding into creating an alternative geography, blending elements from different cultures and cinematic traditions. Could you elaborate on how you approach these ideas of reimagining history and geography in your films?

My collaborators Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati and myself always say that Universal Language is neither an Iranian film nor a Canadian film. It is somewhere at the confluence of both. It is a blended space of métissage, a merging of two cinematic spheres – a kind of Venn diagram from which a third and new space emerges. I often joke that Iranian cinema emerges from 1,000 years of poetry, while Canadian cinema emerges out from 50 years of discount furniture commercials. The idea of bringing these two points on the cinematic compass together is both absurd and beautiful, but it also reflects the world we live in – a world that is impossibly complex and yet deeply interconnected with mixed results. In making this movie, we are working from a position of no borders, absolute belonging and mutual interdependence. 

This was also true of our methodology of making Universal Language. The movie is very much a collective expression of creativity. Often I would come up with an idea knowing that Pirouz and Ila would find it funny, and likewise Ila would come to the table with an idea she knew I would connect with. We were constantly bouncing ideas off of each other and the script really emerged from this long dialogue and, even more fundamentally, our long friendship. Building the images in photography and production design followed very much the same process. It was a very joyous experience and this is what happens when you make movies with your closest friends. The movie itself represents something of a collective brain and all of us were learning how to see. We were all there serving the film.

At the same time, course, Universal Language is a very personal film. It draws from elements of my life – my family, my memories, my dreams, my parents’ lives. But it’s not a story I’m telling alone, I’m telling it with other people in the profoundly collaborative artform of filmmaking. The goal again was to create a third space – something that isn’t exactly autobiographical or fictional, but somewhere between the two. 

You started your career primarily as an animator, initially gaining recognition within the lineage of Canadian animators focused on experimental and short-form animation. In The Twentieth Century, the visuals strongly reflect influences from Karel Zeman, particularly in the seamless blending of live action and animation. Moreover, some of your short films evoke the spirit of Norman McLaren’s Neighbours, with their innovative use of movement and form. Could you discuss how your background in animation has shaped your approach to filmmaking? Additionally, how did you make the transition from animation to directing feature films?

Well, that’s true – I did begin with animation. I loved to draw when I was growing up and my parents learned very swiftly that if they gave me a pen and a stack of paper I would occupy myself for hours, even days. My friend Trevor Anderson once said something that has always stuck with me. He said that filmmakers typically come from one of two places: either they come through theatre – approaching cinema via acting – and are afraid of the camera, or they come at it through image-making and are afraid of actors. I think there’s a lot of truth to that, and I definitely fall into the second category. I think in terms of images, first and foremost. Animation is a natural extension of that way of seeing. I even prefer drawing my scripts rather than writing them.

The Twentieth Century, credit Voyelles Films

That said, I’ve never had the desire to make a fully animated film. I love the hybridity of Karel Zeman, in which live action elements interact with animation. I find that interplay fascinating because it destabilises the viewer’s sense of realism. It challenges the idea of cinema as a simulacrum – an “authentic” imitation of reality – and instead embraces its inherent artifice.

The arc of cinema history has often bent toward the notion of “authenticity” – striving to create something so irresistibly realistic that we forget that what we are watching is merely a movie and we believe what we are seeing to be the truth. This is why Steven Spielberg is the greatest historian of our time. His simulacra of the American past are so credible that we easily mistake them for factual accounts. And yet, as Mr. Kiarostami would tell you, the greater the ”authenticity,” the greater the lie, because the simulacrum is a network of carefully engineered and rigorously hidden artifices. There’s always an element of cheating: a person plays another person, a city plays another city, even the day can sometimes perform as the night! Myself I am really interested in exposing those artifices and exploring their expressive potential. It’s like what happened to painting once the photograph was invented. Paint was suddenly liberated from the tyranny of “authenticity” and we could explore the expressive power of the material itself. As per the Cubist critique of figurative painting: a flat surface cannot ever truly represent three dimensions. Defying the simulacrum and embracing the artifice enlarged our creative experience of painting and I believe this will happen with cinema.

In all his films, Guy Maddin really tears the mask off the simulacrum. Those scratchy soundtracks he deliberately incorporates, for instance, alert us to the materiality of film itself – the optical soundtrack spooling one too many times through the projector – and yet he uses them to create infinitely mysterious atmospheres. Many of the joys of watching a Maddin film stem from brazenly fake special effects, insane continuity errors, deliberately wooden performances and melodramatic dialogue. To me there is something absolutely liberating about that. 

My feeling is the space of the simulacrum is now migrating into Artificial Intelligence, video games and virtual reality. As such, I believe cinema is in a transformative phase, a space where we might be released from the burden of the simulacrum and move into new modes of image making. For me, that’s an incredibly exciting place to be.

The Twentieth Century, credit Voyelles Films

In The Twentieth Century, you also use a colourful, almost plastic visual style to underline the artificiality of Canada’s first Prime Minister’s ambitions through the medium itself. 

Yeah, exactly. That’s about the form energising the function. It was two things, really. To be very frank, part of it was making an aesthetic virtue of a very small budget. But that alone is not a good enough reason –  you must work within your means, of course, but you still have to serve the film and its ideas. That particular film is driven by a strongly anti-nationalist sentiment. Twentieth Century takes as its subject a nation-building project at the moment when “Canada” was essentially being invented and graft upon the world map. I wanted the viewer to be confronted by the artificiality of that project in every frame, to really feel at every moment that what they are watching is completely fabricated and constructed, like a piece of architecture. So the plastic visual style is part of the statement of theme. And of course the optimism of that film is that the structures we build can also be deconstructed. 

The approach in The Twentieth Century seems to involve telling the story of the Prime Minister in a way that is obviously not historically accurate yet still carries a deeper truth. 

There’s an historical argument for every single detail in that movie, but it’s not at all a factual account – brazenly so. Historians will watch it and complain about its inaccuracies – and indeed they have. But the fictitious elements of the movie are very plane to see. Spielberg might hide his artifice; any stretch of the truth or blatant untruth is very carefully hidden in his work, in the service of the simulacrum. In my film, the untruths are very much on display.

The Twentieth Century draws from a rich tapestry of influences, including cinematic icons like The Wizard of Oz, literary classics such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the surrealist artworks of René Magritte. Apart from critiquing nation-building, what other themes inspired you in creating this film? Additionally, what was the initial spark that led you to focus on this particular Prime Minister and the events depicted?

It was really the character that drew me in. He had these strange pathologies that were fascinating to me – obsessed with his mother, fascinated by ghosts and ectoplasm, he was also an ardent and highly-emotional pet owner. He had all manner of odd frustrations and ambitions, and was such a lonesome figure – a lifelong bachelor, his life riddled with extremely hesitant, punctured romances. He left a diary, which you can read online. I think of the diary as a kind of parallel consciousness – it’s not a strictly historical document, but a way of processing events through a very subjective lens, full of his emotions and ambitions as a young man.

There was something about that that fascinated me. I saw a way to express something personal through this story – I could see some part of my own life in him. And beyond that, it was also a way to make fun of Canada, which I wanted to do.

The Twentieth Century, credit Voyelles Films

To talk about Universal Language and The Twentieth Century for a moment – we noticed that both films seem deeply connected to their cultural origins. With The Twentieth Century, it feels like the more familiar someone is with Canadian history, the more they can appreciate its nuances. Similarly, with Universal Language, understanding Iranian culture or cinema seems to enrich the viewing experience. 

That might be more accurate for The Twentieth Century. However, most Canadians who watch that film are equipped with the same knowledge as somebody from Somalia or Japan. Broadly speaking, Canadians don’t know anything about Mackenzie King or the specifics of his life and the film does not rely on any advance knowledge or Wikipedia searches. Anything you really need to know to follow the story, the film does tell you. I think it’s more about whether or not you have any interest in watching a movie on the subject of Canada, and that might be no one (including Canadians).

The Twentieth Century, credit Voyelles Films

With Universal Language, it’s a bit different. It blends together two distinct spheres through which viewers can enter the film. Those who are very familiar with Iranian cinema or culture will surely find additional layers of meaning, such as the reference to Laboo (Persian word for steamed beets traditionally sold by street vendors throughout cold seasons) is a detail of which Iranian viewers will have the fullest pleasure. Similarly there are a few jokes in the film which only French-speaking viewers will fully grasp and, naturally, there are unrelenting references to Winnipeg culture which have a near-narcotic effect on Winnipeg viewers. But again, nothing hinges on catching any of these. They are just about making the world of the film into a precise hybrid.

One thing we have noticed is that both spheres have a similar experience watching the movie. Iranians with no connection to Canada have told us the film makes them nostalgic. And Canadians, who have no connection to Iran, have also said the movie makes them nostalgic. It’s fascinating for us to see, because it suggests a shared emotional resonance. The film intertwines the codes of Iranian and Canadian cinema so deeply that, in effect, these two distant spheres feel nostalgia for each other. It’s like a new space of belonging, a proximity between two spaces between which we might imagine great distance. It’s surreal and it’s the result of reworking cinematic codes and yet, in a lot of ways, our intercultural world is exactly like that.

We can see how Universal Language resonates with people from diverse backgrounds, as evidenced by its success in winning the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival…

That’s right. Those Cannes audiences surely did not grasp the full meaning of many of these very local details and it didn’t matter. Most of the events and details come from my own life, which is parochial as you can get. But the heart of the movie lies in its mood, its feelings and the world it creates. 

Ultimately, I think that’s one of the great pleasures of cinema – encountering a world that is so well-defined that it feels complete and immersive, even if you’re unfamiliar with some of the particularities. We know a lot about Brooklyn because of the movies which take place there. Think about how much we know about Gilan (one of the northern provinces of Iran) because of Kiarostami. 

There’s something amusing this reminds me of – an anecdote from before Brexit. People often asked what language was most commonly heard in the streets of London. You’d think it would be English, but surprisingly, it was Polish! I bring this up to draw a parallel: the depiction of people speaking Farsi in a Canadian city in Universal Language doesn’t just stem from imagination or a dream. The Iranian community has such a prominent presence in Canada. In cities like Montreal, Vancouver, or Toronto, you often see Iranian shops, restaurants, and hear Farsi spoken in public spaces.

Would you say this strong Iranian presence in Canada adds another layer of meaning for Canadian audiences when they watch Universal Language? Does it uniquely reflect the immigrant experience and cultural integration in a way that resonates with viewers?

You could look at it that way. We think of the film as a transnational piece, made in the spirit of sharing, with no borders and no binaries. We live in an era of great rigidity which increasingly seeks to contain people within very strict boundaries, organising our identities and experiences into structured containers. So many Berlin Walls are going up all around us in our politics, in our economies, on Instagram. But I feel like our lives, as they are actually lived, are infinitely more fluid, part of a complex, interconnected, ever-flowing river. Ila Firouzabadi has this beautiful neologism which I love: “rivership,” referring to the kind of long friendship where we flow together. 

We’re connected in ways that are mysterious, improbable, absurd and deeply beautiful. The film reflects that idea. While the prismatic form is surreal, I think it speaks to the reality of how interconnected and hybrid our lives actually are. Our identities are comprised of many complex realities and there are spaces where we are all part of a common, mutually-interdependent story. 

Universal Language, credit: Maryse Boyce

Could you discuss how the themes in Universal Language evolved and what inspired you to incorporate elements of Iranian culture and Farsi? Was there a specific moment or experience that sparked this interest?

The idea emerged through some improbable connections between my life and Iranian cinema, specifically a story from my Grandmother’s childhood. To illustrate the hardships and poverty of the Great Depression in the 1930s, she told me about finding a two-dollar bill frozen in the ice on a Winnipeg sidewalk and how she and her brother tried to get it out to feed their family for a week. It’s a story that stayed with me, captured my imagination.

Much later, when I was a teenager, an Iranian friend introduced me to the children’s films produced by the Kanoon Institute. She took me to see Where is the Friend’s House? and Taste of Cherry and they both had a monumental impact on my young life. I had never seen any films like these and I quickly started watching everything I could find. What struck me about the Kanoon films was how much they resonated with my Grandmother’s story. These fables about children having to navigate the complex and sometimes frightening world of adults, always drawn into a humanistic and poetic synthesis about our responsibility to others. In many ways my Grandmother’s story would have made a very good plot for a Kanoon film. Even Mr. Panahi’s The White Balloon focusses its drama on the problem of lost money. But, more fundamentally, there was something very touching to me about how this story from the childhood of my then-octogenarian Grandma, who had always lived in Winnipeg, could many years later find such an improbable echo in these Iranian films from the other side of the world. 

So the initial idea was to tell this family story through the cinematic language of Kanoon. Making it in Farsi in this blended world between Tehran and Winnipeg emerged very much through my friendship with Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi. In a lot of ways, the film is an expression of our lives together. As we moved into production a multitude of Iranian collaborators worked on the film in every department at every phase of production. So it really is a profoundly intercultural piece on every level.

Universal Language was made in a spirit of sharing, which is one of the reasons why I appear in the film myself. The presence of the director playing a version of themselves is very much a trope of all the great Iranian metaphysical ciné-poets and a key element of the grammar we wished to adapt. This version of myself was also a kind of valve through which I could make myself as vulnerable as possible.

My mother died very suddenly just before the pandemic lockdown and I found myself in Winnipeg, in the now-empty house I grew up in, walking through familiar streets as if for the first time. My father also passed away not long before and I think it’s a familiar experience to anyone who becomes an orphan, your sense of belonging and of family begins to transform. I do think that our film, at its very core, in both its form and its narrative concern, is about adoption. The idea of creating a new, broader space of belonging. 

Could you tell us a bit more about your time in Iran? What inspired you to travel there, and what was your experience like?

As I say, my first real point of contact with Iranian culture was through cinema. When I was 21, I went to Iran with the hope that I could go to film school there. I was quite naïve at the time and innocent about the complexity of the world, but I had heard about a film school founded by Mohsen Makhmalbaf and it didn’t seem impossible to me that I could go to Iran and be his student. I very swiftly learned that it was indeed impossible – in fact, Makhmalbaf, I later learned, had already left Iran. But, I spent three months in Iran and it was a real turning point in my life. You have everything ahead of you when you are 21. I met a lot of really amazing people, started to learn Farsi. It set me on this path of dialogue with Iranian cinema, which has continued ever since.

In a way, making Universal Language felt like going to an Iranian film school. Every time you make a film, you are learning how to see, how to make something which doesn’t yet exist. For this project, we are all of us learning how to see through this very unusual intercultural prism. 

Universal Language seems to be rich with references to Iranian cinema, particularly the works of filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami, Mohammad-Ali Talebi, Kiumars Pourahmad and… For example, the beginning of the movie, set in a classroom, and the end part as we saw the storm at night strongly evokes Where Is the Friend’s House? by Kiarostami. The boy with the camera in the beginning of the film also feels reminiscent of Kiarostami’s The Traveler. In the middle section, the sunset moment reminded me of Taste of Cherry, while the character of Massoud, with his moustache, seems like he could be inspired by The Report, also by Kiarostami. The final section brings us back full circle to Where Is the Friend’s House?, with its stormy night scene while the boy writes his homework. Were these films consciously referenced while you were writing the screenplay? Or do these influences naturally emerge in your work?

I would add to that list Sohrab Shahid Saless, whose film A Simple Event is a seminal influence for me, and, I must presume, for Mr. Kiarostami also. There are many resonant echoes between A Simple Event and Where is the Friend’s House? But yes, the tropes and codes I associate with the great metaphysical poets of Iranian cinema are part of the grammar of our movie. They are very directly referenced and brought into dialogue with a host of other allusions to films from Winnipeg and Québec. The metaphysical allusions to Where is the Friend’s House? work almost like a motif – a bit like how Lynch references The Wizard of Oz in his film Wild at Heart – in part because the question of that film’s title is a question our film is also asking. I love the poem “Address” by Sohrab Sepehri – from which the title “Where is the Friend’s House?” is drawn (Mr. Kiarostami’s film is also dedicated to Sepehri, lest there be any debate about the origin of that title) – which essentially operates as an abstract, surreal cartography. We think of the film as new kind of map, a poetic geography.

Aside from Kiarostami and other filmmakers known for working with children, such as Majid Majidi, your work also seems to draw inspiration from Mohsen Makhmalbaf…

A Moment of Innocence is one of my favourite films of all time. A masterwork of metafiction. And its final freeze-frame is certainly the greatest in the history of freeze-frames. 

As you know Makhmalbaf’s career has gone through distinct and often controversial phases, ranging from his early revolutionary works, revolutionary ideologies and radical approach to filmmaking to his later, more moderate and introspective films. Are you drawn to any particular phase of his filmmaking, and if so, why?

Yes, he has gone through an extraordinary evolution and I understand his controversy. However, Salaam Cinema and A Moment of Innocence, two films he made in the aftermath of Close-Up, are both truly great. And I love that he has not atrophied, he has continued to reinvent himself. I’m also quite fond of his film about Bahaism, The Gardener. 

Although you have studied Iranian cinema extensively, it seems that Universal Language reflects the influence of certain filmmakers and specific periods of Iranian cinema more prominently. Would you agree?

Yes, absolutely. Iranian cinema is of course extremely vast. Our movie reflects what is sometimes called the “Iranian New Wave”, but I think of it more as the metaphysical poets of Iranian cinema, which you could trace back to Forough Farokhzad and The House is Black. Contemporary directors like Asghar Farhadi, for example, I wouldn’t site as an influence. Farhadi is a brilliant dramatist, of course, but he works absolutely within a very rigorously narrative form rather than in poetry or abstraction. Our movie is a poem. Similarly, I think of Mani Haghighi and Mohammad Rasoulof as brilliant dramatists who work outside the “New Wave” school…

Actually, we thought there might be a direct reference to Mohammad Rasoul’s early film The White Meadows. In that film, there’s a character collecting tears, which parallels the tear-collecting character in your movie.

That’s fascinating! I haven’t seen that one. Ila Firouzabadi had the idea of a character who collects tears and consoles people by profession, and that idea is both sad and also very funny to me. There are all manner of improbable connections which people make with the movie which we are constantly discovering as it moves through the world. The connections really are everywhere when we look for them. 

Negar Nemati, your costume designer for Universal Language, has also worked with renowned Iranian directors like Asghar Farhadi and Mani Haghighi. It’s interesting to know if you chose her because of her collaborations with those directors. These filmmakers are part of a newer wave of Iranian cinema, which has shifted both thematically and aesthetically over time.

In the past, Iranian cinema – the era you like most – often centred on themes of love, kindness, and moral simplicity. For instance, in Majid Majidi’s films, poverty was often equated with morality – poor characters were portrayed as inherently good. But now, as we see in Farhadi’s works with characters from mainly the middle class, the narratives have become more complex and socially critical. The tone of most serious Iranian movies (not the purely commercial comedies) has grown darker, reflecting a society grappling with frustration, anger, and systemic challenges. How do you feel about these shifts, and have they influenced your view of Iranian cinema?

Artists must seek to relate to the world and its tensions, certainly. For our movie, we don’t see it as a political film or one preoccupied with social realities of the kind you describe. Again, this is not an Iranian film. It is not a Canadian film. It is not trying to assign meaning to either of those places or speak on behalf of any group or ideology. 

However, I will say that the film is gentle and it is kind and, at this point in human history, that might be a political gesture. Unlike most movies, it is not structured around conflict or any kind of oppositional paradigm. There are a couple angry people in the movie (though mainly for comic effect; anger is innately funny) but otherwise it is a series of nice, gentle events. Our world has become very brutal and very rigid and, in that context, the simple idea of being nice to each other is perhaps becoming a radical act. 

One of my favourite moments in the film is the extra-long hug between my character and Dara Najmabadi. The hug is a direct invocation of how Pirouz hugs people. He really holds you in his arms, often for upwards of five minutes. I really love that about Pirouz. It’s a radical moment in the movie because we have become so accustomed in movies to explicit extremes. Extreme violence, extreme sex, extreme cruelty, extreme confrontation. But I can’t think of too many films I’ve seen, particularly in the West, which contain a scene of extreme niceness such as this. Extreme niceness is our only political banner. 

Aside from Iranian cinema, your film’s visual and narrative style reminded us of several iconic directors. For instance, the framing – where locations take precedence over characters, as seen in certain scenes of The Grand Budapest Hotel – is reminiscent of Wes Anderson’s work. Another striking similarity is to Roy Andersson, particularly in the way you use negative space and position characters at the edges of the frame, creating a sense of emotional isolation, as in the scene where Matthew speaks with his boss. And overall, the film’s distinctive voice, so different from much of contemporary world cinema, echoes the early work of Jim Jarmusch. Were these influences intentional, or did they emerge subconsciously during your creative process?

A number of reviewers have drawn comparisons with Wes and Roy, but they are not influences for me. However, Jacques Tati is a very important influence. And of course there would be no Wes and no Roy – nor would there be Elia Suleiman or, on a very different register, Ullrich Seidl – without Jacques Tati. But it really goes to show how much space Wes Anderson occupies in the general film-going consciousness. Tati, his master, long forgotten, Wes rides the zeitgeist into the sunset. 

I would say Chantal Akerman hovers over this movie to some degree also, particularly her film News from Home. The Canadian filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz has made a number of brilliant personal docu-fictions which have also been a big inspiration to me as I worked on this project. And Aki Kaurismäki I see as kindred spirit; he can really walk a fine line which is both very ironic and cold and yet very warm and loving. 

And of course, the film is also the child of a whole orgy of Winnipeg filmmakers. Maddin, the Wizard of Winnipeg, looms large in my cosmos. But I would also say John Paizs’ short film The Obsession of Billy Botski and John Paskievich’s masterwork Ted Baryluk’s Grocery have been instrumental codes for shaping the visual language and humour in the film. You can see a lot of Tati in Paizs also. I’m also very fond of a short, James-Benning-inspired film by Nigel Webber entitled Eleven Parking Lots and One Gradual Sunset which, in the finest Winnipeg tradition, explores the poetic interplay between the banal and the divine. Beyond that, the late Nick Hill, commercial video artist and discount furniture salesman is also summoned into dialogue with the great Iranian masters in this crazy hybrid film.

Even the classroom scene, with the boy’s Groucho Marx costume, feels like a homage to Woody Allen’s films. This seemingly simple detail evokes comparisons to Annie Hall and other films where Allen paid tribute to classic comedians.

Actually, the boy in the school was me. When I was in school, I used to dress up in that costume and makeup like Groucho Marx.

Could you share how you met Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, your collaborators on the screenplay, and how they became integral to this project? What brought you all together for this unique journey?

Ila Firouzabadi & Pirouz Nemati, credit: Maryse Boyce

Pirouz I met 12 years ago through Sylvain Corbeil. Pirouz is a muse, a documentarian, a gastronome and a brilliant actor. He is now hard at work, in fact, on a documentary about iconic Montreal restauranteur Hemela Pourafzal, who also plays the woman sitting next to the turkey in our film. We both had a shared love for Iranian cinema and really connected over the idea of making this Kanoon-style project. We spent years discussing it, and his enthusiasm was absolute. He was perennially insistent that we move forward, even during moments when I felt the obstacles might be too great. We literally talked about it for over ten years and also made one short film together in that time. 

Pirouz was a big believer we should definitely make the film in Farsi and that really gave me the courage to go for it. The idea of making a film in Farsi in Winnipeg really appealed to our shared sense of transnational idealism and opened up exciting possibilities for intercultural collaboration with the Iranian community, which became one of the film’s defining elements. 

I met Ila a little bit later. Pirouz had returned to Iran for a time, and Ila was dividing her life between Iran, France, Belgium and eventually Montreal, where our paths crossed through Pirouz. She and I became close friends very quickly. Ila is a sculptor and installation artist by profession and new to filmmaking and this brought exciting new energy to the project. Deeply intuitive and punk rock to her core, Ila has a real knack for casting and was also the Farsi coach for the children (and me) during the shoot. 

The leadership of Ila and Pirouz as producers on the film with the support of acclaimed and visionary Québécois producer Sylvain Corbeil really formed the beating heart of the film’s production.

Sylvain Corbeil is a highly respected producer, known for his work on art-house films and with directors like Denis Côté, Xavier Dolan, and Charlotte Le Bon. How did he become involved in this project, and what role did he play in bringing it to life?

Like Pirouz and Ila, Sylvain is first and foremost a friend. I’m a big believer in making films with your best friends. Sylvain is also an administrative genius and a true creative daredevil. This film is, in many ways, impossible to make. So many things stand in the way of a film like this ever existing. And Pirouz and Ila and I all agree that it exists because Sylvain trusted us and got behind our crazy ideas with 100% enthusiasm. Often producers try to dissuade you from being spontaneous and try to scale back your ambition, but Sylvain was always the first to encourage our experimental impulse. 

Regarding the screenplay, I noticed the character of the schoolteacher was quite intriguing – a nervous, agitated figure who sets an interesting tone early in the film. His limited screen presence felt like a deliberate choice, as we only see him briefly again on the bus. Was this character initially envisioned to have a larger role in the story? Or was his minimal presence always intended as part of the narrative’s structure?

He is a kind of composite of several teachers I had throughout my school days in Winnipeg. Most of them were unhinged narcissists who despised both children and education itself. On one level the whole scene is trying to imagine why the schoolteacher is so angry in the first scene of Where is the Friend’s House? and why, in fact, he is late to arrive in class. So we remixed him with the frustrations and self-loathing typical to the average Winnipeg school teacher.

When he later reappears on the bus, we learn more about him and why he is so upset. But his reappearance also serves as a temporal and spatial clue – a way of anchoring the audience in time amidst the film’s punctured narrative. His return destabilises and then reorients the timeline, removes our bearings and then gives them back.

This approach mirrors the overarching theme of the film: the fleeting, ephemeral connections we make in life. Like the teacher, many characters appear briefly and are never seen again, such as the woman with the turkey when the bus breaks down. These moments are intentionally left open-ended, reflecting the transient nature of human encounters. We pass by strangers every day – each one with a complex life and narrative of their own. Often we catch a fragment which suggests the more complex order in which they are embroiled. We tried to raise such questions about each small character we meet in the story.

Mynarski Death Plummet, credit Voyelles Films

This question touches on both screenplay and direction. Universal Language appears to blend two distinct elements: on the one hand, it seems to walk in the realm of realist cinema, drawing influence from the Kanoon film style; on the other, it distances itself from reality through the way it depicts locations with an abstract, almost surreal quality. The framing of locations, lines, buildings and snow carries a sense of abstraction and layered visual storytelling, reminiscent of The Twentieth Century, where settings and characters take on a painterly, otherworldly quality.

Your film transitions from a relatively realistic opening into a dreamlike, poetic atmosphere as it progresses. This tonal shift is especially bold in two key sections: the sharp, strange atmosphere of Matthew meeting his boss, where framing and cutting feel starkly unreal, and the surreal, magical realism toward the end, where the characters of Masoud and Matthew seem to transform, and the tone becomes entirely otherworldly.

Was the contrast between realism and magical realism an intentional choice, or did it evolve organically during the creative process? How did this progression from a grounded world to a surreal one influence your vision, directing choices, and screenplay?

What’s interesting about the two moments you mention is that they are both shot-reverse-shots, both of which break the simulacrum and remind us that what we are watching is a movie. Through a defiant breaking-of-axis in the first instance and in a sudden change of cast in the second. 

For me, the scene with Figure Skater Jessica Rousseau gliding across the ice as [composers of the original soundtrack] Amir Amiri and Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux play their instruments, is a pivotal moment. It’s one of those scenes that most producers would tell you to cut because it doesn’t contain any crucial narrative information. But I always believed it was essential to the rhythm and the experience of the whole because it signals to the audience that we’re moving into a dream. From that point on, the film moves into quite a different mood.

As far as photography is concerned, I did not film very much. Director of Photography Isabelle Stachtchenko and I worked to pare things down to the minimum number of shots. There was very little coverage and I tried to commit as much as possible to the mise en scène without giving myself much opportunity to cut around things. However, we also left room for spontaneity. A great example is the scene where Mr Ghamgosar, the turkey seller who was played by Bahram Nabatian, sings classical Persian poetry. That wasn’t in the script – it was his idea. He came to us on the day of the shoot and said “I think I should sing for the turkeys,” and we all said “yes!” My only intervention was to change the lighting. I thought if he sings for the turkeys, it’s night instead of day. But beyond that, we just turned on the camera and let him perform. When he finished, he called “cut” and that was it. 

We were all very amazed by his performance but in the moment of filming, neither Pirouz nor Ila nor myself had any clue how it would fit into the story. But later, with editor Xi Feng, it fit right in so perfectly that I can’t imagine the movie without this moment. 

It’s an example of the kind of miracles that can occur when the collective brain is really well-calibrated. Other ideas attached themselves to the central idea and enlarge it. It’s what I like to tell young filmmakers, when you really create space for your collaborators to express themselves personally through the prism of the film you are making together, the movie comes alive and you discover it together. 

What interests me most of all is cinematic emotions, that is, emotions that are produced by cinematic language. Most films seek emotions through dramatic language – the characters, their situations, their problems. But I’m after what cinema alone can say. 

Earlier, you described film as a medium capable of transcending borders and binaries, and this notion is evident in your unconventional casting choices. For example, in The Twentieth Century, Louis Negin plays the protagonist’s mother, and a female character sports a moustache, blurring traditional gender roles. Similarly, in Universal Language, Ramin S. Khanjani, a male performer, portrays a female bingo announcer, while Danielle Fichaud, a female actress, takes on the role of Matthew’s male boss.

It’s all about destabilising codes – challenging the binaries we use to interpret and organise the world. When something initially reads as one thing but reveals itself to be another, it creates a space for the audience to question the assumptions at work in their sense of “authenticity.” For example, my performance in Farsi is, in itself, a form of drag. It’s not my mother tongue – and neither is French, the other language I speak in the film – and there’s an inherent artifice in how I’m speaking. But I feel the distance you hear in my Farsi actually has the effect of creating proximity. In Winnipeg, for example, virtually everybody has an accent of some sort. It is a measure of fluidity.

Farsi is of course a gender-neutral language. The Farsi pronoun “او” (ou), is neither he nor she, but both of these. And Farsi speakers frequently use he and she interchangeably in English because this binary does not exist in Persian. So “او” became the banner under which we made the movie. The universal “او” Even “Agha” (sir) and “Khanoum” (madame) are used interchangeably in the movie, regardless of how the person being addressed appears to present. It’s an invitation to rethink the way we perceive and understand identity.

Your approach to music exemplifies your broader philosophy of fluidity and the blending of different worlds. In Universal Language, you collaborated with two composers – Amir Amiri, a master of classical Persian music, and Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux, an electro-ambient musician – to create a unique and immersive soundscape. 

The collaboration between Amir Amiri and Christophe Lamarche Ledoux is one of the sweetest stories. Amir is a master of the santoor and of classical Persian music. Christophe is an electro-ambient musician. They didn’t know each other, but I loved both of their music, and I had this theory that a blending of their two sounds would create something completely singular. 

So, I introduced them to each other and pitched to them this Figure Skater Scene. Jessica Rousseau would need music to prepare her choreography before the filming so it was the first piece of original music to compose. I told Amir and Christophe what I wanted this to sound like, and I sent them off into a room to compose. When they came out of that room two things had happened: they had created a perfect track and become best friends!

Right away of course, it became clear they would do the soundtrack for the whole movie. The sound they devised is really a perfect musical metaphor for the film. It’s a hybrid, at the confluence between classical Persian and electro-ambient avant-garde. Since the movie wrapped, they have continued to make new music and perform together under the moniker PolyAmiri.

The soundtrack also features some licensed music, namely one track by the “Afghan Elvis” Ahmed Zahir and Winnipeg’s own Burton Cummings who croons “These Eyes” at the end of the movie, which marks a sudden shift in tone.

Your film involves a mix of professional actors, non-actors, and even children. Given this diversity, how do you approach directing your cast? Do you rely more on rehearsals, or is your method rooted in spontaneity?

This film wasn’t particularly performance-heavy in terms of extreme emotions or stunts or tap-dancing skill, but of course the film has a particular tone and it was important every actor get on that frequency. I’m a big believer that a lot of that has to do with casting. It was about choosing people who had something personal to say through the character they would play. Most of the actors in this film – except for the children – were friends or collaborators we already knew well and it was easy to adapt the script to their personalities. Some are professional actors – like Mani Soleymanlou, Baharan Baniahmadi, Nora Zarkandi, Danielle Fichaud – but most of the cast work in other professions in their lives and yet have a real talent to perform.

I’m not a director who likes to micromanage actors. I have great respect for their work. If you cast correctly, all you need to do is talk about the scenes and the tone, figure out the blocking and then when it’s time to film, the direction becomes mostly technical – adjusting for pace, timing, choreography etc. Actors do their best work when we feel great trust and freedom to express ourselves.

I believe the director is the point of synthesis. A whole collective brain is making the film and the director is synthesising all the synapses – aesthetic, atmospheric, visual, aural, rhythmic, emotional, administrative – into an articulate thought. A lot of that work is action-reaction. Failure is the most normal experience for all artists and you are following a feeling through millions of micro- and/or macro-failures until it feels right. 

Your decision to use a 16mm camera is intriguing, especially in a time when most filmmakers rely on digital or simulate film texture with filters. Directors like Tarantino and Nolan still use film, but 16mm carries a distinct experimental and tactile quality. What drew you to 16mm, and how did it shape your creative process?

16mm comes partly from my experimental background. There’s something about the materiality of 16mm that feels alive to me. Unlike 35mm (or, God forbid, digital) which is much more high-resolution and sleek, 16mm has a grainier, courser, less precise texture. I find that less information leaves more room for the audience to imagine things and it’s why I love 16mm most of all.

This approach extends to how we shot the film. For example, we deliberately avoided showing faces in many scenes. In conventional dramatic cinema, we’re accustomed to close-ups of the speaker’s face. But withholding that information – focusing on someone listening or moving away from the action altogether to focus on something entirely off to the side – creates a different kind of engagement. Again, it stimulates the viewer’s imagination, allows them to have their own relationship with what they are seeing. 

There’s one amazing driving scene in Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence which I particularly love. It’s Makhmalbaf and his younger self driving along in his car as Makhmalbaf explains things to the young man. Makhmalbaf does most of the talking but we never see him. The camera is focussed entirely on the young man who is listening more or less mutely. In the West, we are obsessed with following the centre of the action and always seeing – explicitly – the most active agent in the scene. It’s like how they film hockey games, always with the eye on the puck. 

Abbas Kiarostami was a pioneer of this approach, which Mohsen Makhmalbaf mirrored in A Moment of Innocence. Kiarostami often placed his characters in cars, using the confined space as a setting for deep and meaningful conversations. This technique is particularly evident in films like Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, and Close-Up. Sometimes, Kiarostami would even deliberately avoid showing the characters’ faces, opting instead for long shots of the car moving through the landscape, with the dialogue unfolding in the background. 

I like to think of it as a peripheral gaze – the subtle moments outside the immediate drama. In much of North American cinema, the camera predictably follows the dialogue – when one person speaks, the camera stays on them, and when the other responds, the camera shifts. But perhaps the person listening is more interesting than the person speaking. 

You edited The Twentieth Century yourself, but for this film, you chose a new editor, Xi Feng. Similarly, you brought on a new cinematographer, Isabelle Stachtchenko, as part of your creative team. 

I believe casting extends beyond actors – it includes the entire crew. Each film has its own unique personality, its own “brain,” if you will. You want collaborators who not only understand where we are going but who have something personal to say with the material. 

I was really drawn to Xi Feng’s work on This House by Miryam Charles. I thought the editing in that movie was absolutely spectacular. I’ve edited most of my previous films and I love editing and knowing how to edit has served me extremely well as a director. But I also respect the discipline of working with an editor because you can be too much inside of a thing. Editors come to the project from a certain distance. They weren’t on set every day in the trenches and that distance gives them a very important vantage point. And Xi Feng is a master. 

Stachtchenko was also part of This House and many other emulsion-based experimental films around Montréal which I greatly admire. Isabelle has a sense of poetry. I knew she wouldn’t try to convince me to do anything just to show off or amp up her demo-reel or get some lame TV job down the line. She is committed to art 100%. There is a quiet, very thoughtful energy about Isabelle, with a sense of the absurd. In a lot of ways, she is like the film itself. 

Anyway, I owe a lot of thank yous to Myriam Charles. Even she was the first director to think I had any value as an actor so even the decision to cast myself comes, in part, from Myriam. 

Your film began as an intimate and personal project, yet it has garnered significant attention, from festival accolades to being selected as Canada’s official submission for the Oscars. Did you ever anticipate this level of recognition, and how has the journey from a small, art-house project to this global stage impacted you?

I am not a competitive person at all, so it is strange to be in this horse-race. My parents raised me to expect unending disappointment from life and that has served me well. I don’t need a lot of external validation, but certain negativity can be a powerful force so it’s always a relief when a movie goes over well with people. 

Ila and Pirouz and Sylvain and I were REALLY happy with the movie when it was finished. If it only ever played at the Winnipeg Real Estate Seminar and Movie Night in an Oddfellows Basement, we would feel fine about that because we love what we have made no matter what. But it has been very beautiful to see people all over the world really connecting with our improbable, abstract, deeply unconventional movie. 

It’s interesting. I think today’s cultural climate, where so much is driven by oppositional paradigms – this group against that group, this idea against that idea – audiences seem to be finding a certain catharsis in our movie. 

It’s not a didactic movie which aims to convince you of anything or argue with anyone. It simply exists as a gentle artistic monument to our mutual interdependence. The oppositional paradigms – even the well-intentioned ones which I might even agree with – are actually a form of violence and spaces of sharing and collaboration have become more and more rare. 

For me, the joy of filmmaking lies in the process. I love creating with my friends, collaborating, and making something that is meaningful to us. I’m not interested in fame, wealth, or the power structures of the film industry. What I value most is the creative act itself – working intimately with people I care about to bring something to life.

Filmmaking offers the personal joy of creating and collaborating, but it also comes with the challenge of navigating the business side. Financing, finding an audience, and ensuring the viability of future projects are constant pressures. How do you balance your creative vision with the realities of the film industry?

It’s true – filmmaking is always a gamble. 

One way to approach this challenge is to think about the audience differently. There’s a common notion in the industry that audiences are static – that they have fixed tastes and your job as a filmmaker is to reconfirm what they already know they like. But I believe you can create new audiences. It’s more of a risk, but it’s the only way to advance the medium.

Take David Cronenberg, as an easy Canadian example. When he was starting out, it was probably unimaginable who the target audience would be for Shivers. But Cronenberg found a way to make personal films and the audience formed around him. I think this can be said of any film that we truly love and recognise as a work of art. When artists find a way to express themselves sincerely and put their whole heart into their work, I believe an audience can be found.

Do you see yourself continuing to create short experimental films in the future, or do you plan to focus more on feature-length projects moving forward?

I love making shorts! Municipal Relaxation Module and the Parks Canada film I made with Pirouz are two shorts I finished after my first feature. Shorts provide an incredible space for experimentation, for testing ideas, and for playing with form in ways that might not be feasible in a longer format.

In fact, I’m currently working on a series of short archival collages which are intended to be viewed together as a feature-length experience. So, shorts are very much a part of my practice. 

For me, the process is driven by a love of filmmaking, whether it’s a short or a feature, with or without a budget. I’m a worker and I love to work.

Do you envision making another film in Farsi? Has working with Farsi-speaking collaborators inspired you to continue exploring projects in this language?

Absolutely. Ila and Pirouz are two of my closest friends and trusted collaborators and anything we make together, Farsi is sure to follow. Ila and I are already working on another project together, in fact, which is in Farsi and Esperanto. But so many new collaborations and new creativities emerged out of making Universal Language, I feel there is a lot more for us all down that path.

My own journey with the language continues – I can read and write and I know a lot of words and can follow basic conversations but I am very shy to speak. I keep trying to return to Iran to immerse myself and really become fluent. There have been many roadblocks, but I am still alive and still motivated. 

In your work, birds and the role of the tour guide seem to be recurring motifs. For instance, birds play a prominent role in The Twentieth Century and Tesla, while the tour guide emerges as a humorous and poignant figure – most notably in The Twentieth Century, where the Prime Minister quips that if he can’t secure his position, he’d settle for becoming a tour guide. These elements also resurface in Universal Language.

Birds, to me, are inherently funny. And there’s really something about turkeys. Farsi as you know has its own distinct word for turkey, “بوقلمون” (boo-ghalamoon), which is something of an onomatopoeia. But in many languages, the word for turkey points to a different place – like “turkey” in English, “hindi” in Turkish (referring to India), or “dinde” in French (derived from “India”). The word in Portuguese refers to the Netherlands. In Greek, it’s related to Portugal. No one seems to know where this bird is truly “from.” That ambiguity made it the perfect metaphor for the film – a creature that resists being pinned down or assigned an absolute identity. The turkey transcends all borders. 

There’s also an apocryphal anecdote about Benjamin Franklin, who wanted the turkey to be the national bird of the United States. He believed the bald eagle to be a bird of low moral character, stealing from the nests of other birds. So Franklin wanted the Wild Turkey to be the national bird because with turkeys you get community. They move in groups; there’s solidarity with turkeys. The turkey embodies the film’s themes of connection, belonging, and finding one’s place in a seemingly chaotic world.

And the tour guide?

He comes from my dad, Laird Rankin, who was a lifelong promotor of Winnipeg history and very committed to Winnipeg’s cultural life. Winnipeg is an improbable and very empty place and even an object of condescension in Canada, but he was unrelentingly enthusiastic about it throughout his whole life. So, the character of Massoud is kind of an embellishment of this element of my father’s being. 

There’s also something very Canadian about this kind of guided tour. Canadian culture is extremely bureaucratic and many of our national monuments and historic sites are hilariously bland and banal.

Interesting. I’m just looking at my notes and just have 86 more questions. Do you have another three hours?

Agha, I beg you. I will die if I answer another question. Please release me!

About The Author

Hamed Sarrafi is a UK-based cinephile, critic and translator. He has written and translated for Iranian newspapers and magazines for 20 years and more recently has established his podcast, Abadiat Va Yek Rooz (Eternity and a Day), in which he reviews movies and film festivals and also interviews filmmakers and fellow film critics. Sarrafi is particularly interested in interviewing emerging directors on their social and political views. His interviews have been published in Cineaste, Notebook (Mubi) and Cinema Without Borders. Ramin S. Khanjani is an independent film researcher, writer and filmmaker. His writings have appeared in various English and Farsi publications such as Film Monthly, Film International and Offscreen. He has written a monograph on the Iranian auteur filmmaker, Ali Hatami and contributed to The Directory of World Cinema: Iran 2 (2017) and Transnational Crime Cinema (2022). In both his filmmaking practice and his writings, he is guided by a preoccupation with the history of cinema and a desire to investigate the question of cinematic form.

Related Posts