Matthew Rankin's second feature film is an anomaly on this year's Oscars shortlist for international feature films. For one thing, it's set in a world that doesn't actually exist, positing a surreal fusion of East and West that transports the earnest rural dramas of the Middle East to the bland, snow-covered industrial areas of Winnipeg, Canada. The plot is difficult to describe, as it involves an eye-catching turkey, a very boring tour guide, and an office worker who quits his job to visit his mother, all tied together by the story of two young children who find a buried banknote. Bewildering, in the ice.
It shouldn't work, but it does, as proven when the film won the Rankin Audience Award after it premiered at the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes last year. Here, he provides some vital backstory that helps make (more) sense of one of the strangest films of the year…
DEADLINE: This isn't the usual type of film that makes it to the Oscars shortlist. What were your thoughts when you saw it had been cut?
Matthew Rankin: [Laughs.] Well, yes, I'm not a competitive person, and I don't have very high expectations from life. My parents raised me to expect relentless disappointment from the world, so I never set the bar high. Any hope for the future I might have had as a boy has long since been crushed from me. So, I find it a bit improbable and surreal, but it is Hazaras it is a measure of how people connect with the film. It's an unlikely film, it's true, but that's what we notice when we show it around the world – people He does Really connect with her. Abstract and surreal as it gets, people feel He – she. This is really fun and nice for the whole team, so we'll see how far we can take this dog and pony show.
DEADLINE: There are a lot of ideas packed into this movie. What is the organizing principle?
Rankin: This is a great question. That's right, it's not necessarily a movie where you can tell the story. Yes there is He is The story – there is a narrative experience, there are characters – but the experience of it, I think, is a cinematic experience. I always describe it as a Venn diagram between two fields: it is the language of Iranian cinema and the language of Canadian cinema merging in a liminal in-between area and trying to create a third space. I find that this third space is where people connect.
It is the idea of creating, in a non-educational and non-political way, a proximity between spaces between which we might imagine a great distance. I mean, my favorite joke in the Q&A is that Iranian cinema emerges from a thousand years of poetry, and Canadian cinema emerges from 50 years of discount furniture commercials. The idea of combining these two things is a bit silly, but so is our world. It's also a miracle that we're all alive here at the same time. We have this very short period of living together, all together at the same time, and that involves all kinds of complexity and absurdity, but also beauty.
I think these coworking spaces are becoming more and more unusual. In many ways, I feel like the film emerged about the pandemic and its isolation, and I feel like we're still reckoning with how sick that isolation has become. We see it in our politics, we see it in our social media, how many people have the Berlin Walls going up all around us, and opposing paradigms are the way we organize the world now, in a very strict way. But we have created a very fluid space, where the spaces that we normally perceive through opposing paradigms – in the way we organize and understand them – find this central area where they flow together like a river between all the dualities. There's a certain catharsis to it.
DEADLINE: Why Iranian cinema? Why Iranian culture?
Rankin: Well, I would specifically say that it is [referencing] Iranian cinema is more than just culture, and it started that way. I mean, the film moves between the subatomic particles of my life and my city of Winnipeg, and out into the universe. It started with a family story. My grandmother told me a story when I was very young, describing her life during the Depression in Winnipeg in the 1930s. She told me the story of how she and her brother found a bill frozen in the ice on the street and they went on this trip across town to get it out of the ice and they had to navigate the adult world. They were very poor, the bill was worth two dollars, but they would feed their families with it for a week.
However, it was a story about the Depression that captured my imagination as a boy. Much later, when I was a teenager, I got involved in Iranian cinema in a big way. I had an Iranian friend who took me to see Abbas Kiarostami's films. Then I became very obsessed, delved very deeply, and became very passionate about the films produced by the Canon Institute, the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Youth. They made all these films for children, and they were very beautiful, very human, very poetic tales of children facing adult dilemmas. Even in the film Jaafar Panahi White balloonThe drama revolves around lost money.
Anyway, somehow there was an echo of the story of my grandmother who, I don't know, had a little explosion in my brain. There was something very moving to me about the idea that my grandmother who was in her eighties at the time, who had always lived in Winnipeg, only spoke English, and that she would have this story that would resonate in these Iranian films on the other side of the world. . The beginning of the movie came out of that. I felt excited. I love cinematic language, and the original idea was to tell my grandmother's story through the lens of the formality I associate with these films.
Then I started working with Pirouz Nemati and Ella Firouzabadi, who are the producers and co-writers of the film. We were really excited to make it in Persian and expand this idea on a big level. And so it became something else.
Matthew Rankin, Director of Global Language
PR Factory
DEADLINE: I have no idea about Winnipeg. What can you tell me about Winnipeg that would shed some light on this film?
Rankin: Well, it's the city where I grew up. I think we always have a complicated relationship with where we grew up. It is a city located in the geographic center of North America, but on the edge of North American society. I mean, there's very conservative Winnipeg, which really wants to assimilate into the North American mainstream and all the lies of success and fame and money, but there's counter-cultural Winnipeg, which has always been a part of Winnipeg, which is really defiant and really focused on the idea of challenging the North American mainstream.
This produced a number of truly amazing outside artists – Jay Madden would be the most famous and well known. In fact, I think Jay is the greatest ambassador for the city of Winnipeg and what it stands for. A very distinct film culture has emerged in Winnipeg, and you can see a lot of it in our film. He focuses heavily on surrealism, reusing the codes of cinematic language to tell personal stories. That's what Jay Madden is all about, really. I mean, he reuses the outdated language of 1940s melodramas and silent films to tell these personal and unique stories.
I would also say that Winnipeg has a great history of weird humour. One of my favorite Winnipeg movies is The big bag [1985]Animated film by Richard Conde. It's a bit forgotten now, having been nominated for an Oscar in 1986, but it's a masterpiece. It's completely absurd and completely satisfying, and it was the first movie I remember watching where I really got to know my city and could say, “These are the people I know.” It's an animated movie, but it really looks like a mirror. The correct answer to your question is that Winnipeg is geographically isolated and therefore an otherworldly place. That's true to an extent, but I think it also has a very punk rock challenge to orthodoxy, which is something I really like.
DEADLINE: How does this film relate to work you've done before, such as your debut, XX century, [2019]And your shorts?
Rankin: It's very different. The first film is a historical film, but it also plays with reality. It is a biography of a real person [former Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King]but her novels are on display far too often. It's not a Spielberg parody where you hide all the tricks and create a picture of the past that's so irresistibly believable that you forget you're watching a movie and think you're seeing the American past. Not so. It's really in your face how artificial it is; It uses highly theatrical sets and includes very absurd and surreal events He does They have a historical argument. But historians, of course, complained that it was a terrible story and something hateful. That's it, it's like alternate history, whereas I think of this movie as alternate geography.
There is a lot in the process that connects them. I would say the humor definitely connects them in a real way, but more fundamentally so does the process. I have a background in history and my previous career was as an academic historian. I'm not an academic at all, but the thing that always fascinates me is the problem of putting reality into another form. The historian takes the raw chronology of the past and organizes it into a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Although they claim to be scholars, there are artistic processes at work even in writing history, even purely text-based history. The problem of putting history on film is much more interesting. Converting truth or anything that has a very close relationship to reality as we understand it into image and sound is even stranger.
I am a filmmaker who truly loves the art of cinema. The arc of cinema history has really bent towards simulation and re-creation of realities such that we forget that we are watching a movie. The idea is to get as close to reality as possible, as close to authenticity as possible. But I actually feel like the opposite is more interesting, which is that embracing the art of cinema can take us further, to a new place. This is something that both films have in common; They have a relationship with reality, but they are fed through perspective, and you can see the trick in action.
DEADLINE: What's next for you? Are you just focusing on this film or do you have any other plans?
Rankin: Yes I do. Yes, my body is being shipped to many points around the world at the moment, and I haven't had a lot of time to cram the next things together, but I'm working on a couple of things. Ella Firouzabadi and I are working on a documentary filmed partly on the subject of Esperanto [a man-made international language devised in the 19th century]. Interestingly enough, there are some real threads that emerged during the making of this film that feed into the next one. In parallel, I'm working on a completely archival film, purely archival, about a Canadian conservative politician, which will be a very experimental film but which will nevertheless tell a story about the theme of conservatism, which, of course, is one of the themes that concerns us at the present time.
DEADLINE: Are you at all nervous that Donald Trump might buy Canada, as he has suggested in the past?
Rankin: I heard that. I'm sure he can get a good deal. He's known for his deals, right?
