Universal Language

This is not much of a promotional video for Winnipeg
unless you love concrete and snow in that order
(Une langue universelle
آواز بوقلمون
Āvāz-e bughalamun)
dir: Matthew Rankin
2025
If you haven’t noticed yet, I live for movies. I love the very existence of movies, and have done so for many decades. But even I realise the futility of such a thing.
The movies will never love me back. You give your heart and soul to something, but what it gives you is something completely one-sided. All my adulation, all my longing is for naught…
But that’s okay. I will love cinema not one bit less ever just because it doesn’t love me back.
How else would I get to watch something as niche as this flick? A Canadian movie with the deliberate aesthetics and visual references to Iranian films of yesteryear, set in an alternate reality Winnipeg where Canada’s two main languages are Farsi and French?
That’s… so niche it’s created its own niche. Its own genre. A pigeonhole for one.
And then there’s that title, implying that maybe Farsi should be the universal language, or Quebecois, take yer pick, but I suspect in fact the title is talking more about friendship and kindness.
To say this is a weird film is both an understatement and false advertising, because while it’s weird, it’s more in the “gently odd” category rather than the outlandish or surreal. The easiest, laziest go-to I can think of is something like what Jared Hess first conjured way back when with Napoleon Dynamite, decades before making that Minecraft movie but without the catchphrases or quirks. This is not an outwardly quirky flick, nor is it a dark Lynchian sexual / violent odyssey into Winnipeg’s dank underbelly.