With his Oscar-shortlisted feature Universal Language, Winnipeg-born director and co-writer Matthew Rankin tried to resist the “pathological solitude” that has emerged following the COVID-19 pandemic.

The French and Farsi-language film, set somewhere between Winnipeg and Tehran, follows three seemingly unrelated people and their stories as they eventually intersect. Rankin himself stars in the film as a Quebec government worker who quits his job to visit his mother. Meanwhile, two children try to claim money they found frozen in ice and a guide introduces tourists to the historic sites and monuments of Winnipeg.

Also starring in the film is Nemati, Mani Soleymanlou (Avant le crash), Danielle Fichaud (Aline) and newcomers Rojina Esmaeili, Saba Vahedyousefi and Sobhan Javadi.

Work on the surrealist comedy, one of 15 films shortlisted for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards, first began in 2012 with a preliminary treatment by Rankin, co-writer Pirouz Nemati and Metafilms’ producer Sylvain Corbeil. The film received development support from the Harold Greenberg Fund in 2013 under a previous title, Akhavan. The script’s third writer, Ila Firouzabadi, would join the team later down the line.

However, Corbeil informed Rankin that he could only seek production financing in 2018 at the earliest due to his large slate of projects. In the meantime, Rankin completed short films such as The Tesla World Light and Mynarski Death Plummet. He released his first feature film, The Twentieth Century, in 2019.

Shortly before the COVID-19 lockdown began in 2020, Rankin’s mother suddenly died. Attending the Berlin International Film Festival at the time for The Twentieth Century, Rankin says he returned home to Winnipeg and described feeling lost and alone in the most familiar place. Wanting to be as personal and vulnerable as he could with Universal Language, those feelings and the return to Winnipeg soon became important elements in the film.

In 2021, with The Twentieth Century completed and the pandemic pushing everyone to connect and focus, the group doubled-down on securing financing for the film and work on Universal Language kicked into high gear. It was then that the pandemic and its effects on people, politics, social media and economies made its way into the final draft.

“The solitude of that time has metastasized into a pathology and we are now rigidly alone in a very real and frightening way,” Rankin tells Playback Daily. “[Universal Language is] a movie very resistant of that.”

“The movie is really driven by a longing for connection across distances both great and small,” adds Rankin. “So, in a lot of ways, the pandemic brought a real creative urgency for us.”

The team secured production funding from Telefilm Canada and La Société de développement des entreprises culturelles in 2022. Filming wrapped in Montreal and Winnipeg in early 2024 with the support of federal tax credits and provincial tax credits from Manitoba and Quebec. The film is executive produced by Nemati, Firouzabadi, Rankin, Daniel Berger, Aaron Katz and Aaron Graham.

Universal Language is distributed in Canada by Maison 4:3. Oscilloscope is the film’s U.S. distributor and Best Friend Forever is handling international sales.

After being named Canada’s Oscar pick on Aug. 27, 2024, the team got to work on a far-reaching campaign strategy. Each of the film’s distributors, from around 35 countries, has been asked to contribute to advertising in their own territory, according to Corbeil. He says that there has been significant advertising campaigns in both Canada and the U.S., with the latter campaign headed by Oscilloscope and Divergent PR.

Outside of traditional advertising, Corbeil and Rankin have also prioritized attending Universal Language screenings around the globe as a way to promote the film through word of mouth.

“We’re kind of from the old world, when you were enthusiastic about something you would tell your friends very enthusiastically,” says Corbeil. “That’s also how we prefer to make the word spread.”

That desire to spread their film to audiences globally is what lead the producer-director duo to the edge of the wildfires that have devastated large parts of the greater L.A. area.

The pair sat on a couch in a West Hollywood hotel during their a call with Playback, a block away from Sunset Boulevard and the nearby Palisades fire that is still burning as of Jan. 20. Rankin and Corbeil had planned for a longer stay and to attend more screenings in California, but due to safety issues and cancellations had to move up their flights to New York City.

Despite tragedy cutting their visit in L.A. short, the pair, according to Corbeil at the time of the interview, has attended close to 100 film festivals.

Universal Language has won over audiences and awards across the globe, including the Bright Horizons Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival, the People’s Choice Awards at the Pingyao International Film Festival, the FIPRESCI Prize at the Vienna International Film Festival and Best Canadian Feature Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Universal Language was also selected for the National Board of Review’s Top Five International Films for 2024.

“We’ve seen the reaction of the people,” says Corbeil. “So, we’re kind of naively confident, just about the film itself. I think that’s what it should be about. It shouldn’t be about who puts the most money in a campaign.”

Image courtesy of Metafilms