At the world's glitziest film festival, Winnipeg is ready for its closeup

Filmmaker Matthew Rankin is headed to Cannes. So is Guy Maddin and his collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson. Together, they make up a rare Winnipeg delegation premiering their latest surrealist features in the South of France, at the world's most famous film festival.

I ask Rankin on a Zoom call about this "Winnipeg to the World" moment at Cannes. He responds with a joke people always tell in his hometown. "You make some art, it goes out in the world and the world likes it, the Winnipeg people will be happy for you," Rankin says. "But if you make some art, it goes all over, the world hates it and your life is destroyed, then the Winnipeg people are really happy."

Drake can probably relate.

Rankin's making a return trip to Cannes. His avant-garde short The Tesla World Light, which animated the inventor's plea for more financial support from his benefactor J.P. Morgan into a short-circuiting fantastical nightmare, competed at the festival in 2017. Rankin has since won high praise for his 2019 debut feature The Twentieth Century, which scored a best Canadian film prize at TIFF for its comically twisted take on former Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King's rise to power. The Twentieth Century also earned Rankin comparisons to fellow-pegger Maddin's dizzying and absurdist films (think The Saddest Music in the World). They certainly shared a vibe, though Rankin's inspos were more Monty Python and Czech animator Karel Zeman.

Like Maddin's Rumours, a comedy about G7 leaders lost in the woods starring Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander, Rankin's new film Universal Language is an international affair. Clearly "Winnipeg to the World" means these filmmakers are breaking free from the deliriously insular world we got used to in films like My Winnipeg. Or perhaps they are dragging the world to delirious Winnipeg.

Rankin's devilishly funny and surprisingly warm ensemble comedy, which he co-wrote with Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi and premieres Saturday in the Director's Fortnight section at Cannes, follows a tour guide (Nemati), a government employee (Rankin), two precocious children (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) and a turkey (turkey) as they bounce around the forbiddingly cold wintry town. But this is a Winnipeg that has lapsed into some liminal space and merged with Montreal and Tehran. It's a Winnipeg where everyone speaks Farsi (and a bit of French) and the Tim Horton's serves Persian Tea, and kids dream of being diplomats or raising donkeys. 

"We think of it very much as a Venn diagram," says Rankin, a Winnipegger who also happens to live in Montreal and speak Farsi — in case you were wondering what kind of personality would come up with this concept. "The idea was to create this sort of brain. This Quebeco-Irano-Winnipego brain that could produce its own thoughts."

Rankin is on the Zoom call from his Montreal apartment alongside Firouzabadi, explaining how his film — at least in its original conception — drew stories from his own life, like when his grandmother and her brother, as children during the great depression, found a $2 bill frozen in ice on Winnipeg's streets. He connected her attempts to extract the cash to the children's adventures in Iranian films produced by Kanoon (the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children & Young Adults) like Abbas Kiarastami's Where Is The Friend's House? and Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon. 

"I became enchanted by this idea of telling that story using the cinematic language of Iranian metarealism," says Rankin. 

In his film, the kids Negin (Esmaeli) and Nazgol (Saba) scramble for the "500 Riels" trapped in ice — currency is named after Louis Riel in Rankin's Iran-nipeg. The kids seek assistance from Rankin's melancholic wanderer, in town to reunite with his mother, and Nemati's hilariously perplexing tour guide. The latter drags visitors to Winnipeg's drab low-rises, a dried up fountain  and a suitcase that's been abandoned and left untouched on a park bench since the 70s, now growing weeds. Rankin has a lot of fun with the heightened artificiality. The absurd props, off-beat interactions and a turkey that shows up at bizarre moments are all played perfectly straight and sincere. His style here lands somewhere between Panahi and Wes Anderson, while also recalling some of the sinister humour from The Twentieth Century, where the director poked and prodded at a dangerous sense of nationalism in Canada's history.

But the director reminds that it's not just his style and fascinations on display. He explains the collaborative nature on this project, with contributions from his friends among the co-writers and his cast. Rankin points to a lovely scene featuring Bahram Nabatian (father of Montreal filmmaker Kaveh Nabatian), where the actor, playing a turkey expert, breaks of his own accord into an unscripted song. The scene ended up being so potent that the film's Persian title became Lovesong for a Turkey.

"We didn't really know how this was going to fit into the story when filming it," says Rankin. "But now we feel it's such a critical scene. … When you're really open to your collaborators, and people are expressing themselves freely through the prism of the movie, you start with these ideas but then other ideas attach themselves to that idea."

Firouzabadi, a multidisciplinary artist, talks about how the themes in her drawings and installations also informed Universal Language. Her work — which features bodies converging, fountains and spirals — emphasizes circularity and interconnectedness. So too does the film, which she talks about as a response to COVID, a movement from solitude to solidarity, whether between disparate people, cultures or cities. "We're really talking about friendship and community, which is rare these days," she says.

"We're still kind of processing all of the emotional injury of confinement," adds Rankin. "The meaning of togetherness has transformed since that period."

It's Firouzabadi who also expresses a connection that she felt between Tehran, where she's from, and Winnipeg. She describes it as sensing two worlds within Winnipeg, what's on the surface and what's bubbling beneath the surface. "There's something going on between the two cities and the intersection between them, which is exciting and scary."

Rankin gets it, and spells it out: "Winnipeg has a great counter-cultural impulse — a really anti-establishment punk rock kind of art world that really resists in a very defiant way mainstream Anglo-America and all of its meaningless codes of success and celebrity and wealth."

Rankin draws a through line from Louis Riel to the 1919 General Strike to the Winnipeg Film Group and his contemporaries like Rhayne Vermette, Darryl Nepinak and Mike Maryniuk. To him, they all exhibit that countercultural defiance towards a more corporate and conformist Manitoba, which he describes as "reverent of North America and all of its mainstream lies."

"These are constantly in tension with each other and in a bizarre way that tension is very creative. For Winnipeg artists, it starves them. But it also feeds them."

The 2024 Cannes Film Festival runs from May 14-25.