Amman, April 19 — The Cinema Committee at Abdul Hamid Shoman Foundation will screen the Canadian film Universal Language by director Matthew Rankin on Tuesday evening at 6:30 PM at the Foundation’s cinema hall in Jabal Amman.
The 2024 film sees Rankin tell his story in an unconventional manner, weaving three storylines that often intersect in surprising ways. The stories take us to an imagined borderland between Tehran and the Canadian city of Winnipeg. In this fictional world, Canada becomes a blend of both identities and a model of coexistence, bilingual in Farsi and French rather than English. This is reflected in the prevailing culture, on billboards for Canadian brands, and in the architectural character of the place; Tim Hortons, for instance, becomes an Iranian tea house, where traditional Iranian architecture merges with Canadian snow.
In a parallel narrative, each story unfolds independently. The first story begins with the film’s striking opening shot — a static exterior of a brick building in Iranian architectural style bearing the inscription “Robert H. Smith Elementary School” in Farsi, a school dedicated to teaching French to Iranian immigrant students. Through the window we see children misbehaving while waiting for their late teacher, who moments later is seen dragging his bags through the ice. After scolding the students in Farsi, his conversations with them reveal their difficult financial circumstances — among them Omid, whose father barely scraped together enough money for glasses to help him see the board, only for Omid to lose them because of a turkey, an excuse the teacher dismisses as absurd. On the way home, Omid’s classmate Nijin and her sister Nazgul stumble upon a frozen 500-rial banknote near the school. Believing they can free it from the ice and buy Omid new glasses, they spend their entire day wandering the city in search of an axe to retrieve it. This storyline recalls the epic childhood adventure in the Iranian film “Where Is the Friend’s Home?” (1987) by Abbas Kiarostami, one of the filmmakers of the Iranian New Wave.
The second story follows Masoud, an independent tour guide who constantly struggles to make his city of Winnipeg interesting to tourists. Absurdist humor arises during his city tours — he presents a residential building with a decorative wall where no notable person ever lived as a major landmark, points out a small neglected memorial to revolutionary leader Louis Riel beside a busy road, and shows tourists a bus stop bench where someone left a bag decades ago, left there ever since in case its owner returns to claim it — a bench now registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
By the third story, all the puzzle pieces fall into place and the picture becomes clearer, taking on a more intimate tone. It follows Matthew Rankin — played by the director himself — a former Winnipeg resident, first seen resigning from a tedious bureaucratic government job in Montreal and boarding a bus back to Winnipeg. He then calls his long-estranged mother’s number, only to have an unknown man answer, who arranges to meet him that evening.
The film moves between stories with fluidity and calm, gradually dissolving the boundaries between characters until it reaches its climax, where all three stories converge in a poetic, realistic, and enchanting conclusion that defies easy categorization. The film is also a highly inventive comedic meditation on cultural identity, human connection, and collective cinematic memory. Universal Language stands as one of the most charming and singular films in recent memory and rightfully earned Canada a shortlist spot for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.