Winnipeg-born director wins big at Canadian Screen Awards

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/06/2025 (473 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Matthew Rankin began his speech in Farsi, took a detour into French and wound back toward English when accepting the Canadian Screen Award for achievement in direction Sunday for Universal Language, a feature film set at a dreamy intersection connecting Winnipeg to Tehran.

“This is delightful,” Rankin told the crowd at CBC’s Broadcast Centre in downtown Toronto. “I’m from Winnipeg — I’m not accustomed to winning anything — so this is really weird and sweet and nice, so thank you very much.”

It’s a line that Rankin will now be forced to retire: with six wins — including original screenplay, editing, costume design, casting and art direction, handed out at Saturday’s industry gala for cinematic arts — Universal Language, shot in Winnipeg and Montreal, was a repeat champion on Sunday night.

Based for several years in Quebec, which Rankin hailed as “one of the last places where art and culture is thought of and defended as a public good,” the director, who also co-wrote and co-starred in the film, was quick to mention his upbringing at the Winnipeg Film Group, where as a teenager he enrolled in filmmaking workshops.

“I really want to take the opportunity to thank all the weirdos of the Winnipeg Film Group,” he said, later mentioning the late Cinematheque programmers Dave Barber and Jaimz Asmundson in a message shared with the Free Press. “This is where I learned how to make movies in an artist-run centre. Those people are really keeping Winnipeg weird, and I love that.”

Universal Language, which was the Canadian submission to this year’s Academy Awards for best international feature, had its world première in competition at Cannes. Last spring after a sold-out local première at the Centre culturel franco-manitobain, Rankin carved up several Jeanne’s cakes with the film’s title written on top in green Farsi script.

In a five-star review for the Free Press, Alison Gillmor wrote that “while the film is laugh-out-loud funny — literally — it is also, by the end, as the wandering characters are finally brought together, ineffably sad and delicate.”

“Rankin’s work has always been clever and comic, but there’s a new tenderness here as the filmmaker brings in autobiographical strands, fusing them into a poetic expression of regret, longing and the meaning of home and family,” she added.

Rankin, who in addition to French and Farsi is also learning Esperanto, has built a stellar career playing with the narrative strands of Canadian identity and political memory. His debut feature The Twentieth Century is a fantastical reimagining of former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s origin story, while short films including 2014’s Mynarski Death Plummet and 2010’s Negativipeg are more localized, equally rewarding experiments in semi-fiction.

In February, Universal Language — co-written by Rankin, Ila Firouzabadi (who took home the best casting award) and Pirouz Nemati (who lost the award for leading performance in comedy to Cate Blanchett in Guy Maddin’s Rumours) — was named best Canadian feature by the Toronto Film Critics Association, earning a $50,000 prize.

“This is a movie we made with our whole heart,” Rankin said Sunday. “We all know what political moment we’re living in. Every day there are new Berlin Walls shooting up all around us and pitting us against each other into very cruel binaries, and if our film stands for anything, it stands for the fact that kindness can, in fact, be a radical gesture, and that’s really what we believe in now more than ever.”

Other Winnipeg-related winners at the awards include the locally made Wilfred Buck, which nabbed David Schmidt an award for best editing of a feature-length documentary, and local writer Scott Montgomery as part of a team of winners for best writing, animation, for the Apple TV+ prodution Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin.

The 2025 Canadian Screen Awards show, which aired live June 1 on CBC and CBC Gem, is also available to stream on Crave as of 8 p.m. Monday.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com