Matthew Rankin’s ‘Universal Language’ wins top prize at Melbourne film festival

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Universal Language

Source: Cannes Directors’ Fortnight

‘Universal Language’

Universal Language by Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin won the Bright Horizons Award at the 72^nd Melbourne International Film Festival, where animation Flow by Latvia’s Gints Zilbalodis picked up a special jury prize.

The top prize came with a cash award of $95,000 (A$140,000) and was awarded at a ceremony on Saturday (August 24).

Scroll down for full list of feature film winners

Australian films Voice, directed by Krunal Padhiar and Semara Jose, and Left Write Hook, directed by Shannon Owen, shared the MIFF Audience Award.

Jaydon Martin won the $47,500 (A$70,000) Australian Innovation Award for his direction on Flathead, which has yet to sign a sales agent despite winning the Tiger Competition Special Jury Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival earlier this year.

April Phillips won the $13,500 (A$20,000) Uncle Jack Charles Award, which is restricted to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander creatives, and also comes with $17,000 (A$25,000) in financial services, for her animated XR work Kajoo yannaga (come on let’s walk together).

Universal Language premiered at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in May, where it won the sidebar section’s first ever audience award. The Persian- and French-language comedy interweaves several storylines, including two schoolchildren finding frozen cash and a tour guide leading confused tourists around Winnipeg. It is a Metafilms Production and sold by Best Friend Forever, with Oscilloscope Laboratories having acquired US distribution rights.

Awarding the top award, the MIFF jury said: “[Universal Language] is a film whose cultural specificity transcends borders; whose cinematic playfulness is matched equally by its sensitivity; and whose very form is in conversation with cinema past, present and future.”

Filmmaker Rankin told Screen he was in “total shock” when informed of the win.

“Ila (Firouzabadi, scriptwriter alongside Rankin and Pirouz Nemati) and I have very low expectations from life and it never occurs to us that we have even one chance to ever win anything,” he said. “Winnipeg is also a city where even the most mild hubristic fantasy is beaten out of you at a very young age, so I really have no competitive impulse at this point.”

Rankin grew up in Winnipeg and sees the film as “one part lonesome Québécois cinéma gris, one part surreal Winnipeg puzzle film and one part Kanoon-style Iranian poetic realism”.

“The events of the story are drawn directly from my family history, numerous diary entries from my time in Iran and several mystifying dreams I had about my parents shortly after they died,” he added.

Rankin and Firouzabadi are now in production on KONGRESO, a docufiction in which they will also both feature on screen. It is in Esperanto and being filmed in Super 8mm in Italy, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Singapore, Ukraine and Montréal, where they both live. A grant from the Canada Council for the Arts is assisting with costs.

“I am also working on a feature-length, very Soda-Jerk-inspired found-footage collage about the history of conservativism in Canada, produced by the National Film Board of Canada,” he added. “Ila is designing the only prop for that movie: the brain of former Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker.”

The MIFF jury also predicted that Flow “through its grace, empathy and universality” will leave a mark on cinema and the world at large”, and said Flathead was a “brilliant, sensitive examination of survival, of humanity and of mortality”.

Flathead director Martin is now developing a film – working title My Hands, Your Soul – with the same docufiction methodology. Set in the world of cosmetic surgery, it will drill down into the physical and emotional cost as well as the physical and emotional transformation.

“It’s personal for me because we’ll be deconstructing the ethics of capturing vulnerable images and moments of someone’s life and [examining] the ethical difference between capturing it for cinema versus for social media,” he said.

“As a filmmaker who works closely with people to cinematically share their life on the screen, I’m always questioning my own morals and the ethical limitations of the medium of film itself.”

MIFF ran from August 8-25.