Winnipeg-shot movie Universal Language makes Oscar short list

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This article was published 18/12/2024 (286 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language has made the Academy Awards’ 15-film short list for best international feature film, giving the locally inspired and shot independent movie a chance at Oscar recognition.

The second feature directed by Rankin, following 2019’s Twentieth Century, Universal Language has advanced to the next round of voting by Academy members ahead of February’s Oscar ceremony.

Selected as Canada’s official submission, and initially facing off against films from 85 eligible countries and regions, Universal Language will vie for an Oscar nomination with films from 14 other nations, including Denmark (The Girl With the Needle, screening at Dave Barber Cinematheque until Dec. 28), France (Emilia Pérez), Latvia (Flow, screening Saturday at Cinematheque) and Senegal (Mati Diop’s art-history doc Dahomey).

Of the 15 shortlisted features, five will earn Oscar nominations.

Shot in Winnipeg and Montreal, and set “somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg,” Universal Language has already earned accolades at some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals, including at Cannes, where the film was awarded the Chantal Akerman Prize, and at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was named Best Canadian Discovery.

Already sold to be screened in 30 countries, the film will have its local première on Jan. 23 at Cinematheque, playing through the end of the month. On Jan. 25, Rankin will be joined by fellow Manitoba filmmaker Guy Maddin for an in-person dialogue at the Cinematheque entitled “The Winnipeg Effect” prior to the film’s screening.

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Bilge Ebiri, a film critic with New York Magazine’s Vulture vertical, has been one of the film’s most vocal proponents, naming Universal Language the fifth best movie of 2024, placing it in the same company as Oscar-winner Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border and RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, an adaptation of the Pulitzer-winning novel by Colson Whitehead (opening in Winnipeg Jan. 17).

“I became mildly obsessed with Matthew Rankin’s film at Cannes (where it stood head and shoulders above most of the other pictures playing at the festival) in part because of the subtle bait-and-switch at its heart,” Ebiri writes.

“The movie is set in an imaginary Winnipeg that is steeped in Persian culture (and where everyone speaks Farsi). That seems like an interesting and surreal conceit — and it is — but the film develops that idea into something far more poetic and moving than might be expected.”

Starring the Montreal-based Rankin, Mani Soleymanlou, Danielle Fichaud, Pirouz Nemati, Rojina Esmaeili, Saba Vahedyousefi and Sobhan Javadi, Universal Language is co-written by Rankin, Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, featuring French and Persian dialogue.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

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Ben Waldman
Reporter

Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the Free Press while earning his degree at Ryerson University’s (now Toronto Metropolitan University’s) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. Read more about Ben.

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