Universal Language

Universal Language / 2024/ Canada/ Dir: Matthew Rankin / 89 Min/ Current Rotten Tomatoes Score: 98%

Winter. Somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg. Negin and Nazgol find a large sum of money frozen deep within the sidewalk ice and try to find a way to get it out. Massoud leads a group of befuddled tourists upon an increasingly-absurd walking tour of Winnipeg monuments and historic sites. Matthew leaves his job at the Québec government and embarks upon a mysterious journey to visit his estranged mother. Time, geography and identities crossfade, interweave and collide into a surreal comedy of misdirection.

Structured like a Venn diagram – at the point of confluence between Jacques Tati and Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy – Une langue universelle is at once a diary film, an absurdist city symphony and a welling-up of confinement-era emotion exploring the mysterious interzone where one person ends and the rest of the world begins. An elusive, half-remembered dream of home, solitude, our responsibilities to others and the wild turkeys that haunt us.