Tehran comes to Winnipeg in Matthew Rankin's singular gem about cross-cultural exchange. Despite being set in a parallel-universe Winnipeg where the people talk in Farsi and the world around them ...

It’s not unusual for a city to double for another metropolis in movies. New Yorkers have long been able to spot when Toronto has been substituted for the Big Apple. Matthew Rankin, though, has gone ...

A lightly satirical and surrealist comedy imagines the snowy Canadian city in the style of the Iranian New Wave. By Alissa Wilkinson When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film ...

On the heels of its world premiere at Cannes, Matthew Rankin‘s comedy Universal Language has been named as Canada’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards. The ...

There’s a notion in the film industry that comedies don’t travel. Jokes have a regional audience, and humor gets lost in translation, the thinking goes. But director Matthew Rankin thinks more of ...

There’s a scene partway through Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language that is a triumph of visual filmmaking. One of the protagonists, Matthew (aka Matheiu), played by the director himself, is arranging ...