Notizie

Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill family saga has been chosen to represent Canada in the best international feature category at the 98th Academy Awards. .

The drama about a Turkish college professor facing major upheavals on two home fronts bowed at Sundance and stars Ekin Koc, Erkan Kolçak Kostendil, Hazar Erguclu and Ercan Kesal.

“I am truly delighted that our film The Things You Kill has been selected to represent Canada at the Oscars,” Khatami said in a statement on Tuesday. “Eight years in the making, this film is a labor of love shaped by the dedication and generosity of so many extraordinary souls. What makes this moment especially meaningful to me is that Canada is making space for stories that Bipoc filmmakers have to share.”

A jury led by Telefilm Canada choosing The Things You Kill, which uses both Turkish and Farsi languages, following Canada’s Oscar contender last year,...

Exclusive: Cinetic Media has signed Charlie Huston, the novelist and screenwriter behind the forthcoming Darren Aronofsky film Caught Stealing, starring Austin Butler.

The announcement follows the news earlier this summer that veteran representative David Karp joined Cinetic as a senior manager.

Huston is the author of 13 novels, including the Hank Thompson Trilogy. Recently, they penned the screenplay adaptation of the first book in the series, Caught Stealing, for Sony, which is slated to release the film in theaters on August 29. Also starring Zoë Kravitz, Regina King, Matt Smith and Bad Bunny, among others, the film follows Hank Thompson (Butler), a burned-out former baseball player, as he’s unwittingly plunged into a wild fight for survival in the downtown criminal underworld of ’90s NYC.

Huston’s spec TV pilot, Arcadia, is now being packaged by Tomorrow Studios. Jennifer Reeder (Shudder’s Perpetrator) is attached to direct their next screenplay, the existential...

Fuelled by strong beer, broken glass, and raw fish, John Hollands' Le Tour De Canada is a frenetic race from St. John’s to Vancouver somewhere in an alternate 1970s - if the chroma keyed backdrops of Toronto are to be trusted, or that Vancouver is somehow both anti-bicycle and trigger-happy. It features a soundtrack that seems lifted out of Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, or at least the chase scenes from that film. It is a bloody and break-neck five-and-a-half minute ride that demands you not breathe, embrace the absurdity, and hang on. I love that there now is a post Guy Maddin nano-genre of superimposed, double-exposed, collage-montage hyper-kino Canadiana where the miracle of artifice is miracle enough. Filmmaker Matthew Rankin is the cheery narrator who sets...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

The interlinguistic tensions at the heart of the Canadian experience are explored at speed in John Hollands’ pulsing and irreverent short. Screened as part of Fantasia 2025, this feisty little film captures a bicycle race between St John’s and Vancouver in a wild melange of styles. There are multiple competitors but only two matter, with the rivalry between the Francophone and the Anglophone expressed through an exchange of glances, summary subtitles and sometimes shocking manoeuvres.

It’s framed through the television viewing of a shopkeeper halfway along the route, whose surroundings are lovingly detailed and full of character despite the brevity of our interactions with him. Narration comes from The Twentieth Century director Matthew Rankin, who briefly explains the history of the competition before a crudely animated official shoots a moose in the head and the racers are off. Elliot Farinaro’s brilliant editing knits together animated and live action scenes.

Malaysian director Bebbra Mailin’s local drama Ninavau is set to open the 8th Malaysia International Film Festival (MIFFest), which will be closed by Pia Marais’s Transamazonia.

The festival will take place in Kuala Lumpur from July 19-27 and has programmed 62 films from 48 countries, up from the 50 titles selected last year.

Opening film Ninavau marks Mailin’s feature directorial debut and is based on a short she directed in 2019. It tells the story of a Kadazan woman who returns from the peninsula to her devout Catholic family with a change of heart in a film that explores cultural identity.

Exclusive: Cinetic Media, the preeminent talent management and media advisory company founded by John Sloss, has made three additions to its team, hiring David Karp as a senior manager, Andrea Wax as a manager, and Noah Stahl as a producer.

The trio joins Cinetic at a critical juncture in the growth of the company’s talent management practice, which already reps an award-winning group of writer and director multi-hyphenates, producers, and emerging talent. Going forward, they intend to aggressively pursue growth objectives, with additional manager hires to be announced in the coming months.

“David, Andrea and Noah bring a breadth of experience and talent to Cinetic at a critical moment in the company’s growth,” said Cinetic CEO Sloss. “There is a lot of chatter about how our industry is contracting, but, contrary to that sentiment, we at Cinetic look at the global marketplace and see nothing but storytelling opportunity.

Iraqi filmmaker Hasan Hadi has won the Directors’ Fortnight People’s Choice Award at the Cannes Film Festival for his poignant, darkly comic debut feature The President’s Cake.

The €7,500 ($8,400) cash prize is the only audience-voted award across the official selection and parallel sections in Cannes and marks a major breakthrough for the New York-based Hadi. The film is being sold internationally by Films Boutique, with UTA handling North American rights.

Based on Hadi’s own childhood in 1990s Iraq, the film follows nine-year-old Lamia, who is tasked with baking a cake to honor Saddam Hussein’s birthday — a seemingly simple assignment with life-or-death stakes. Amid crippling sanctions, food shortages and a climate of fear, Lamia’s attempt to gather ingredients becomes a journey of quiet rebellion and resourcefulness.

Produced by Leah Chen Baker under the banner of Tpc Film LLC, the film has resonated with critics and audiences alike. In her The Hollywood Reporter review,...

One might assume that Cannes, and especially its Directors’ Fortnight section, would be the wrong place for a premiere of a romantic comedy that might be quirky, but is still audience friendly. Sundance, Toronto, probably, but Cannes seems like a long shot. That would be even more of the case if the filmmaker and the production company Metafilms – also responsible for last year’s Un Certain Regard winner, Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language – decided to keep the original title Amour Apocalypse rather than switching it to Peak Everything.

'Peak everything' is originally a philosophical and scientific term from the climate change discourse, and it signals the peril we are all about to face, as we are at the peak of consumption of all our natural resources. That is one of the concerns of our protagonist Adam, a fortysomething kind-hearted man who...

Canada lands at Cannes with a mission to shift the conversation — on the Croisette, at least — from the havoc U.S. tariffs could wreak on the global film industry to the benefits of creative collaboration and co-production with Canadian talent and companies.

As recent successes (Matt Johnson’s SXSW Midnighter audience-award winner “Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie”) and this year’s festival and market titles reveal, Canadian filmmakers are twisting horror and comedy into new shapes and reinforcing the country’s historic strongholds of animation and documentary with new ideas. Over the past decade, holistic, regionally focused companies have been springing up and producing auteur films that are redefining what Canadian cinema is. Indigenous Canadian films, creators and companies are a catalyst in this gradual paradigm shift and have become a regular active presence at major festivals and markets.

“We do arthouse cinema in Canada,” says Montreal producer Sylvain Corbeil,...

Exclusive: Oscilloscope Laboratories has promoted Aaron Katz to SVP of Acquisitions and Development and Alexandra Fredricks as VP of Theatrical Sales with both reporting directly to Dan Berger, president of the New York-based distribution company.

Fredricks steps up after Andrew Carlin moved to Variance Films last month.

Katz, VP of Acquisitions since 2015, joined Oscilloscope in 2011. He recently brought in and executive produced Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, Canada’s Academy Award submission this year that won the first-ever Directors’ Fortnight audience award at its Cannes premiere. He’s acquired and negotiated deals for Oscar-nominated Embrace Of The Serpent, Kedi and other staples of the catalog and served as EP on Vhyes by Jack Henry Robins and Relaxer by Joel Potrykus. The distrib is releasing Potrykus’ Vulcanizadora tomorrow, their fourth collaboration.

Fredricks has been with Oscilloscope since 2022 and steered festival runs for Joyland, Wildcat and Universal Language, among others. She has...

If you’ve already scoured through our massive summer movie preview, then you’re already aware the season’s kick-off is one of the most eclectic months in some time, featuring high-wire blockbusters, the return of beloved auteurs, the year’s finest comedy, and more gems to discover.

16. The Surfer (Lorcan Finnegan; May 2)

After one of the most successful films of his career with last year’s Longlegs, Nicolas Cage returns this year with The Surfer, a beach-set psychological thriller directed by Lorcan Finnegan. Rory O’Connor said in his review, “In The Surfer, an exploitation film set to pressure-cook, a mild-mannered man is pitted against a group who even Andrew Tate might find a touch extreme. It’s set in South Australia on fictional Luna Bay, the kind of place where if the heat doesn’t get you, something else probably will. The water shines turquoise-blue but the beaches look like scorched earth.

The Blue Mountain Film + Media Festival have unveiled the line-up for the upcoming edition (May 29th – June 1st). Cherry picking some of the better films from last year’s Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section, Jason Gorber the Director of Film Programming lassoed the likes of Black Dog, Holy Cow!, Souleymane’s Story and Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow alongside Director’s Fortnight selections Eephus and Canadiana supreme in Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language. Chloé Robichaud’s recent Sundance winner Two Women and Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend (TIFF selection) are among the highlights of the 32 film programme.…...

Paris-based Indie Sales has acquired international sales rights to “Peak Everything,” a romantic comedy directed by Canadian helmer Anne Émond, in the run-up to its world premiere at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.

“Peak Everything” stars Patrick Hivon (“A Brother’s Love”) and Piper Perabo (“Yellowstone). Hivon plays Adam, a kind-hearted kennel-owner who is hypersensitive and borderline depressed. To help combat his eco-anxiety, Adam orders a therapeutic solar lamp, which leads him to meet Tina, a radiant woman with a voice that soothes all of his worries.

“Peak Everything” hails from Sylvain Corbeil at Metafilms, the powerhouse Canadian production company behind Matthew Rankin’s “Universal Language” which won the inaugural Director’s Fortnight prize in 2024, as well as the works of Xavier Dolan, most notably the Cannes Jury Prize winner “Mommy,” Monia Chokri’s “The Nature of Love,” and Charlotte Le Bon’s “Falcon Lake.”

The cast is completed by Connor Jessup (“Locke & Key”), Gilles Renaud,...

Eighteen features and 10 short films will be in the lineup of the independent Directors’ Fortnight section at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, organizers announced at a press conference on Tuesday morning.

The section will open with Robin Campillo’s “Enzo” and will also include German director Christian Petzold’s “Mirrors No. 3,” starring Paula Beer; the Ukrainian documentary “Militantropos,” from directors Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozgovyi; “Dangerous Animals,” a horror film set at sea from Australian director Sean Byrne (“The Devil’s Candy”); the comedy “Peak Everything” from Canadian director Anne Émond; and the closing-night film, first-time director Eva Victor’s Sundance hit “Sorry, Baby,” which will be released by A24 in June.

The section does not convene a jury to choose the best of its films, but for the second consecutive year it will give out an audience award. Last year’s audience award, the first ever given out by any section at Cannes,...

The Directors’ Fortnight, the Cannes film festival independent sidebar focused on cutting-edge, auteur cinema, has unveiled its 2025 lineup.

Laurent Cantet and Robin Campillo’s French drama Enzo will open the section on May 14, with Eva Victor’s Sundance hit Sorry, Baby as the closing film on May 24.

Acclaimed German director Christian Petzold (Yella, Barbara, Afire) will make his Cannes debut in the Directors’ Fortnight this year, with Miroirs No. 3. Petzold regular Paula Beer plays an aspiring pianist whose life is upended when she miraculously survives a car crash and is taken in by a family of strangers who offer to take care of her. Metrograph Pictures pre-bought the film for North America last year.

Other Fortnight highlights include Peak Everything from Canadian director Anne Émond, a bilingual rom-com about a kennel owner who falls in love with a customer service rep over the phone and sets off to find her; Lee Sang-il’s Kokuho,...

Robert Ten Eyck’s “Skin Side Up,” Sebastian McKinnon’s “The Stolen Child” and Richard Raaphorst’s “Children of the Moor” look like three potential standouts at this year’s Frontières Platform in Cannes which bids fair to prove one of the festival’s highest-caliber project showcases.

Described as Drag Queen Horror and boasting a heart-in-the-mouth promo, “Skin Side Up” marks the directorial feature debut of Australian Ten Eyck who as Lazy Susan won RuPaul’s “Drag Race Down Under” Season 4.

Visually gorgeous, shot in lush British Columbia forests, as well as Iceland and France from last October to this July, “The Stolen Child” weighs in as the biggest title at this year’s Platform, a Tolkien-esque dark fantasy which is the only Platform title to have been picked up by a sale agent: Germany’s Picture Tree Intl.

“Children of the Moor” marks one of the latest projects from the Netherlands’ Richard Raaphorst,...

Exclusive: Ahead of the April 4th theatrical release of his latest film, The Luckiest Man in America, Samir Oliveros — writer, director, producer, and co-founder of filmmaking collective Plenty Good — has signed with Cinetic Media for management.

A Colombia-born, U.S.-based talent who has leveraged partnerships at home in Latin America to create film and television for global audiences, Olivero’s Luckiest Man is a starry Colombia-based production that sold to IFC Films and Sapan Studio after premiering at TIFF 2024, in one of the few deals of the festival. The stranger-than-fiction story, based on true events, follows an unemployed ice cream truck driver who, in 1984, drives from Ohio to California to become a contestant on the popular game show Press Your Luck and goes on an unprecedented winning streak, all while keeping a big secret.

The project features a stacked cast led by Paul Walter Hauser, which also includes David Strathairn,...

National Canadian Film Day, a local and global celebration of homegrown movies set for April 16, has received a burst of support from an unlikely source: Donald Trump. The U.S. president’s escalating tariff war and talk of turning Canada into the “51st state” is driving a surge in grassroots support for the annual celebration of Canuck cinema.

The event began in 2014 and now finds itself part of the defiant “Elbows Up, Canada!” campaign. The movement, which takes its name from a defiant ice hockey gesture made famous by Canadian NHL legend Gordie Howe, has seen its slogan become a rallying cry nationwide against the U.S. President’s trade war and threats of annexation.

“Suddenly, we’re in a place where we can say, we have our elbows up. Come join us. Stand up for Canada by sitting down to a great Canadian film,” says Jack Blum, co-founder of Canadian Film Day,...

Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent, a local adaptation of Dick Wolf’s global Law & Order TV series franchise, has nabbed a field-leading 20 nominations heading into the Canadian Screen Awards.

The Citytv series will challenge for best drama, best episode director for Sharon Lewis and Holly Dale, and best drama writing for Tassie Cameron, among other categories. The best TV drama competition also has entrants for the CBC’s Bones of Crow drama, which picked up 12 nominations, and the CBC’s police procedural Allegiance.

Other multiple nominees on the TV side include CTV’s Children Ruin Everything and CBC’s Run the Burbs with 12 mentions each, followed by the CBC’s Paris 2024 Summer Olympics telecast with 11 nominations.

In the film categories, director Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language leads the field with 13 nominations, including for best drama and best direction. Rankin’s Farsi- and French-language offbeat homage to Iranian cinema...

Harmony Korine has designed the poster for the 57th edition of Directors’ Fortnight, the independent sidebar of Cannes Film Festival.

The US indie filmmaker has created what Directors’ Fortnight describes as “a pop work that nods to the aesthetic of video games and its profusion of digital forms and colours.”

“The characters in the painting are called Twitchys. They are always lurking and playing. They are very happy to be at Cannes ☺️,” said Korine. Michel Welfringer did the graphic design for the poster.

The 2025 edition of Directors’ Fortnight will run from May 14-22, with Cannes taking place from May 13-...

Brussels-based company Best Friend Forever has announced a first raft of deals on Jun Li’s sexy Hong Kong-set Drama “Queerpanorama” following its world premiere at this year’s Berlin Film Festival where it bowed in the Panorama section.

The black-and-white film has been sold in North America (Dark Star Pictures), France (Dulac Distribution), Germany, Austria & Switzerland (Salzgeber) and Portugal & Spain (Filmin). Best Friend Forever are also in advanced discussions to close other key territories.

“Queerpanorama” marks Li’s follow up to “Drifting” which premiered in competition at Rotterdam in 2021 and won best adapted screenplay at the Golden Horse Awards. The film was also nominated for best picture at the Hong Kong Film Awards.

The plot revolves around a gay man who “impersonates men he has had sex with and brings this new persona with him to his next date. Only by pretending to be someone else can he be truly himself,...

Ne Zha 2 from Cmc Pictures is no. 7 this weekend, its third consecutive in the top ten, on 600 screens with a domestic gross of $2.9 million and a cume of $17.95 million, an impressive feat. While an India film occasionally does two weeks at the top it’s highly unusual for any foreign film stick around for three. The Chinese New Year title has become the top animated film globally and the highest grossing film ever from a one country (China).

Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst for Comscore North America, calls the performance “remarkable,” representing “a rare example of a non-u.S. film holding steady in the domestic Top 10 for multiple consecutive weeks” and another example of how a film can transcend borders and cultures to become a phenomenon on the big screen” — with a cume at or near $2 billion, a record for an animated film.

Oscar nominated shorts and Best Pictures contenders...

It’s a week until Oscars and contenders (see full list) are out in force adding screens ahead of March 2. This is always an odd period for the indie box office and statuettes will generally determine who ramps up and who tapers down, again. Also this weekend, a Chinese and an Indian film hit the top ten, testament to the ongoing importance of foreign films/alternative content at the U.S. box office that exhibitors have been touting this corporate earnings season. Becoming Led Zeppelin powers on and Universal Language has a nice expansion.

Chinese New Year juggernaut Ne Zha 2 from Cmc Pictures sits at no. 5 spot in week two with $3.1 million on 785 screens and a North American cume of $14.85 million. Last week, it became the highest grossing animated film of all time at the global box office topping $1.7 billion and leader Inside Out 2.

Chhaava, the Hindi historical...

It’s quiet on the indie front. Oscar contenders linger in theaters ahead of the March 2 Academy Awards ceremony that will close the book on 2024. The Indie Spirits unspool tomorrow. The Berlinale, with prizes to be handed out Sunday — along with Sundance last month and SXSW next — are planting cinema’s new crop of independents.

Neon is out with horror The Monkey, which appears to be scaling the heights in wide release. Anora is still on screens. A24’s The Brutalist continues its run.

Relative newcomer Universal Language by Matthew Rankin, from Oscilloscope, expands to 24 screens from two last weekend, adding runs in the New York and Los Angeles area along with Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Austin. The Cannes audience award-winner grossed $51k its first week at two theaters.

New in limited release: Greenwich Entertainment debuts documentary UnBroken by first-time director Beth Lane at the Quad in NYC and...

You certainly don’t need to be from Winnipeg to get a lot of the fun that “Universal Language” is having with an obviously alternate version of the capital of Manitoba. But for those who are from that corner of the Great White North, or particularly studied Guy Maddin devotees — and director Matthew Rankin is both — there are particular gifts much sweeter than an ice-cream cone in winter dotted throughout his film.

In “Universal Language,” two girls look for the means to liberate a huge bill frozen in ice; an intrepid tour guide leads a bewildered group around the landmarks of the city; and a dispirited government employee travels back to Winnipeg to visit his mother. The point isn’t that the stories eventually intersect, although they do. It’s that every overlapping moment gives Rankin and his collaborators room to play with the essential artifice of cinema; and for some of that artifice,...

Universal Language, the original and quietly funny Oscar-shortlisted Cannes and TIFF premiering feature by Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin debuts on one screen each in New York and LA. Chinese animated juggernaut Ne Zha 2 opens Stateside and Oscar Nominated Shorts are back for a 20th season. Sony Picture Classics’ Becoming Led Zeppelin expands to 1,039 locations from 369 Imax screens and IFC Films jumps Armand to 230 theaters from two. Oscar contenders continue to populate screens.

Oscilloscope’s Universal Language quite likes this window with the Academy Awards a few weeks away. In a crowded market, “this date is great. Once the ceremony comes and goes, there is a rotation of films out of theaters,” says theatrical distribution chief Andrew Carlin.

He calls Rankin a great actor and filmmaker with a particular sense of style and Universal Language a film with “a strangeness to it that defies classification” — a plus for Oscilloscope.

Rankin returned the compliment.

Driving around Montreal on a gray November day with Universal Language writer-director Matthew Rankin, production designer Louisa Schabas noticed an elementary school with a row of stark, monolithic concrete walls facing the playground. The slabs were at an angle, allowing for a series of black metal doors to open into the yard. “This is perfect for the market,” she said. With some painted signs indicating a random assortment of mom-and-pop shops, including a bakery and an office supply store, Shabas would later transform the building facade into a ramshackle Winnipeg mini-mall, with the striking anomaly that all of the signage […]

The post “We Couldn’t Find that Exact Beige — It Was a Real Struggle”: Production Designer Louisa Schabas on Designing Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Driving around Montreal on a gray November day with Universal Language writer-director Matthew Rankin, production designer Louisa Schabas noticed an elementary school with a row of stark, monolithic concrete walls facing the playground. The slabs were at an angle, allowing for a series of black metal doors to open into the yard. “This is perfect for the market,” she said. With some painted signs indicating a random assortment of mom-and-pop shops, including a bakery and an office supply store, Shabas would later transform the building facade into a ramshackle Winnipeg mini-mall, with the striking anomaly that all of the signage […]

The post “We Couldn’t Find that Exact Beige — It Was a Real Struggle”: Production Designer Louisa Schabas on Designing Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

It’s a sight familiar to anyone who’s been nurtured on a steady diet of international films: Children are sitting in a classroom, getting lectured by an irate teacher. The conversations are in Farsi, which suggests we’re somewhere on the outskirts of Tehran. The fact that one of the students is dressed as Groucho Marx signals we’re not in Kansas anymore. Eventually, the camera leaves the school grounds and begins to follow two sisters; they’re played by nonprofessional actors Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi, and exhibit...

Imagine Tim Hortons’ signage were comically flipped from right to left, or the face on Canada’s banknote replaced with the haunting image of Louis Riel before his hanging. Or if we were to picture Winnipeg strangely as Tehran. These are just a few of the surreal visual concepts that unfold in the delightfully absurd world of Matthew Rankin’s second feature film, Universal Language. Packed with sight gags, the film is also a melancholic melting pot of cultures, languages, and generations, serving as a heartfelt tribute to Rankin’s own identity. Also starring in the film as a bewildered tourist back in his homeland of sorts, adding a personal touch to what is ultimately a path inwards.…...

First Look, the works-in-progress initiative of the Locarno Film Festival’s Locarno Pro program, will put the spotlight on Canadian cinema this year. First Look has emerged as a key post-production platform for international arthouse projects. Over the years, it has supported films from such countries as Spain, the U.K., Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Israel, Poland, the Baltic states, Portugal, Serbia, Switzerland, and Germany.

Its 14th edition, in collaboration with Telefilm Canada, will take place during the 78th Locarno Film Festival, which runs Aug. 6-16. Taking place Aug. 8-10, First Look will showcase six Canadian films currently in post-production. The selected projects will be presented by their producers to an audience of global industry professionals, including sales agents, buyers, festival programmers, and representatives from post-production funding organizations. Producers will also have the opportunity to feature their projects in the festival’s Online Digital Library, accessible exclusively for accredited industry participants.

Marking his second decade as a film producer, I had the opportunity to sit down with Montreal-based Sylvain Corbeil at the 2024 Marrakech International Film Festival to discuss his latest collaboration with the uniquely talented Matthew Rankin. Rankin’s sophomore feature, Universal Language (set for release this Friday by Oscilloscope Laboratories), has been making waves on the festival circuit since its premiere last May in Cannes. Chosen as Canada’s Oscar submission and a standout in the Directors’ Fortnight, the film transcends borders, weaving Canadiana into a reimagined vision of community.

Corbeil is a seasoned producer with that magic touch, under the Metafilms moniker he has championed projects from acclaimed filmmakers such as Denis Côté, Xavier Dolan, Maxime Giroux, and Anne Émond, and more recently Cannes hits such as Charlotte Le Bon’s Falcon Lake (2022) and Monia Chokri’s Simple comme Sylvain (2023).…...

Oscilloscope Laboratories has acquired North American rights to “Obex” following its debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The surreal, black-and-white fantasy film was directed by Albert Birney (“Strawberry Mansion”) who wrote the script with Pete Ohs (“Jethica”). Birney also stars in the film.

The film was widely praised for its imagination and style, with Variety calling it “entrancing and singular” and comparing it favorably to “I Saw the TV Glow.” It follows Conor Marsh (Birney), a man living a secluded life with his dog, Sandy, until one day he begins playing Obex, a new, state-of-the-art computer game. When Sandy goes missing, the line between reality and game blurs, and Conor must venture into the strange world of Obex to bring her home.

The producing team includes Birney, Ohs, Emma Hannaway and James Belfer, the founder and CEO of production company Cartuna. “Obex” marks the company’s third collaboration with Birney,...

Director Matthew Rankin’s odyssey through a Winnipeg dotted with homages to Iranian film history — and featuring the coziest Tim Horton’s ever designed — has the same title in English and French, “Universal Language.” But in Farsi, the language that is most spoken throughout the film, the movie is called something else.

The Farsi title, آواز بوقلمون, translates to “The Song of the Turkey,” and the reason why is emblematic of both the film’s warmly absurd sense of humor and the community that came together to make it.

While Rankin directed and acted in the film, taking up the mantle of a haunted Canadian bureaucrat (who nonetheless is directed to say only neutral to positive things about his time in government) wending his way back to Winnipeg, he co-wrote “Universal Language” with Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati, and they cast and crewed the project with friends and collaborators they...

Immigration is a hot-button issue in several Western countries as they reconcile the ways in which it is transforming their national identity. Even in the United States, it remains an active tug-of-war. But in Canada, it is a fait accompli, a settled matter, as Canada has largely embraced its destiny as a nation of people from all over the world. Matthew Rankin, in his magnificent new film Universal Language, offers a beautiful paean to Canada’s unyielding embrace of multiculturalism. It would almost be poignant if it weren’t so damn funny. Univeral Language is an absurdist comedy that is not just a great Winnipeg film, but a great Canadian film. It is a film made by Canadians, for Canadians and extolls Canadian values. In...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

“Never in any part of my imagination would I have thought myself to be a representative of anything,” claimed Matthew Rankin, the co-writer and director of Universal Language, when asked about his film representing Canada in the Oscar race for best international feature. That expression didn’t indicate any doubts about the quality of the work. Rather, it was a nod to the irony of a film that deconstructs the idea of nations and borders being selected to compete in a race whose parameters were defined by those exact parameters.

While Universal Language might have missed an Oscar nomination, Rankin’s mode of empathetic and creative intercultural engagement is likelier to stand the test of time than the category’s putative frontrunner. His film blends the deadpan humor of Aki Kaurismäki with the formal playfulness of Abbas Kiarostami as it follows three stories that converge in a wintry setting that...

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Oscilloscope releases the film Friday, February 14, 2025.

Despite being set in a parallel-universe Winnipeg where the people talk in Farsi and the world around them seems as if it’s been frozen in time since the mid-1980s, the haunted but hopeful “Universal Language” is an unmistakably modern film at heart.

Described by writer-director Matthew Rankin as a piece of “autobiographical hallucination,” this wonderfully deadpan whatsit is the work of a white 43-year-old Canadian man who fell in love with the movies a time when “foreign” cinema was becoming more available to people outside major cultural hubs. He found that Kanoon-style fables like “Where Is the Friend’s House?” and “The White Balloon” spoke to him in a way that few English-language films ever had. That discovery sparked a cross-cultural dialogue that eventually compelled Rankin to visit Tehran...

Universal Language could easily have overdosed on twee. Set in an alternate-universe Winnipeg where almost everyone is ethnically Iranian and speaks Farsi, it pays homage to films like Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home? and Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon. Director Matthew Rankin himself plays a character sharing his name, who travels home from Montreal to Winnipeg following news of his mother’s sickness. His story intersects with two subplots: children Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) find a 500-riel note buried under ice and look for an axe so they can chop it out while Massoud (co-writer Pirouz Nemati) leads a guided tour of Winnipeg parking lots and highways.

Although Universal Language is very witty, with TV-commercial parodies and absurdist touches, fundamentally it’s a deeply sad film. This is reflected in its look: during the dead of winter, Massoud leads tourists around Winnipeg’s beige and grey districts.

Rarely has a film synthesized a director’s career inspirations and personal history in more aesthetically unique and drolly entertaining fashion as director Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language. The Canadian-born Rankin’s influences range from Iranian cinema to American comedian Groucho Marx, and both find their way into this bizarre little gem, as do a number of surreal ideas and visual references. Rankin’s second feature is a gently unfolding oddity that mixes and matches time and place in ways that delight as much as they challenge.

And that’s no easy accomplishment. Universal Language contains visual quotes from directors such as Wes Anderson, Jacques Tati, fellow Winnipeg native Guy Maddin, and Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, whose 1987 drama Where Is the Friend's House? is a touchstone here. But instead of being a prisoner to his cinematic role models, Rankin frees himself to put his own private-label stamp on a story...

Yes, we’re still in the warming glow of award season, but new movies never stop. Happily there are exciting new films to check out this February, including Cannes winners, cryptocurrency heists, cute little furry creatures, and some psychedelic horror.

Armand

When You Can Watch: February 7

Where You Can Watch: Theaters (Limited)

Director: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel

Cast: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Øystein Røger

Why We’re Excited: This Norwegian psychological drama premiered at Cannes, earning a Caméra d’Or for first-time feature director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel (grandson of Ingmar Bergman), pegged as one of ten European filmmakers to watch in 2015 by European Film Promotion. The story was inspired by the character of Elisabeth, Armand’s mother (Reinsve from The Worst Person in the World), who is called into school when her six-year-old threatens his classmate. The confrontation and ensuing revelations invite reflection on the way we form opinions about...

“Queerpanorama,” the latest feature by Hong Kong filmmaker Jun Li, has been boarded by Brussels-based sales company Best Friend Forever (“Universal Language”) ahead of its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.

Slated to bow in the Panorama section, the movie marks Li’s follow up to “Drifting” which premiered in competition at Rotterdam in 2021 and won best adapted screenplay at the Golden Horse Awards. The film was also nominated for best picture at the Hong Kong Film Awards.

Set in Hong Kong, “Queerpanorama” revolves around a gay man who “impersonates men he has had sex with and brings this new persona with him to his next sex date. Only by pretending to be someone else can he be truly himself,” the synopsis reads.

Best Friend Forever will launch international sales on “Queerpanorama” at the Berlin Film Festival’s EFM.

Li said he wrote the movie “at a very dark...

Shaking off the January doldrums, February movie theaters fill their love seats (or plush recliners) with lovesick horror and action movies for the lovebirds and lonely hearts, while the actual rom-coms are shunted to streamers. We have Hallmark to thank for turning romantic comedies into exploitation films, but there’s...

Exclusive: This year’s Manchester Film Festival is set to run from March 14 – 23 and will open with a screening of The Penguin Lessons, directed by British filmmaker Peter Cattaneo and starring Steve Coogan.

Based on the best-selling memoir, the film tells the story of an Englishman’s personal and political awakening during a cataclysmic period in Argentine history, brought about by his unlikely adoption of a penguin.

Manchester will screen 37 features, including 15 UK premieres and 4 world premieres. All films will be screening in Manchester for the first time. This includes the Manchester premiere of the UK’s Oscar selection Santosh from Sandhya Suri, Sundance, and Cannes hit Good One directed by India Donaldson, and South by Southwest Audience Award Winner My Dead Friend Zoe from Kyle Hausmann-Stokes.

Other highlights include the UK premieres of Y2K, A24’s latest horror comedy starring Fred Durst and directed by Kyle Mooney, the...

by Cláudio Alves

In the last hours of voting for the Oscar nominations, let's celebrate one of the best films up for Academy consideration. It's none other than the Canadian submission for Best International Film, Matthew Rankin's sophomore feature – Universal Language. If watching the director's debut, The Twentieth Century, felt like witnessing the second coming of fellow Winnipegger Guy Maddin, seeing the wonder of his latest work is akin to re-encountering Jacques Tati in the 21st century. Or perchance a Manitoban Abbas Kiarostami. Rather than evading such comparisons, Rankin runs straight at them, making his latest project into a dialogue between filmic languages and other idioms along the way, reaching for the fantastical, so specific as to be universal…...

Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical Emilia Peréz may be the heavy favorite to win the best international film competition at the upcoming Academy Awards.

But that didn’t stop a host of emerging and established directors from around the world gathering at the Palm Springs Festival Festival to win over Academy voters by touting their audacious storytelling and indie film feats. Many of the filmmakers brought movies that reckon with their past, as with Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, in which Golden Globe winner Fernanda Torres plays a mother of five children whose family is torn apart when the father goes missing under Brazil’s military dictatorship.

Salles told one of two Oscar best international filmmaker panels at Palm Springs that he based his family drama on a book written by a childhood friend, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, whose family and home he often visited and which played a pivotal part...

Matthew Rankin’s second feature is something of an anomaly on this year’s Oscar shortlist for International Feature Film. For one thing, it takes place in a world that doesn’t actually exist, positing a surreal fusion of east and west that transplants the earnest rustic dramas of the Middle East to the bland, snow-covered industrial estates of Winnipeg, Canada. The plot is even harder to describe, involving a spectacle-snatching turkey, a desperately dull tour guide, and an office worker who quits his job to visit his mother, all linked by the story of two young children who find a bank note buried, tantalizingly, in the ice.

It shouldn’t work but it does, as proven when the film won Rankin an Audience Award after premiering in Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes last year. Here, he gives some vital backstory that helps to make (more) sense of one of the strangest films of the year…...

World War II dramas and grand historical epics still have their place in the best international feature Oscar category — Italy’s contender, Vermiglio, the story of a Sicilian army deserter who arrives in a remote Alpine village in 1944, is betting on the Academy appeal of World War II tales — but the expansion of the Academy to include more members outside the U.S. has broadened the range of films in contention. An Oscar shortlist these days is as likely to include a Korean horror-thriller about class conflict (2019 Oscar winner Parasite) or a donkey-focused road movie from Poland (2022 nominee Eo) as it is a handsome old-school costume drama.

Beyond the obvious frontrunners this year, dark horses abound: Rich Peppiatt’s cheeky “docu-drama” Kneecap, about an Irish rap group, has been winning audiences to the cause since its Sundance debut (awards masters Sony Pictures Classics snatched it up on the eve of...

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2024, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

The best film I saw in 2024, Alain Guiradie’s new masterpiece Misericordia, will sadly not be on the list you see below—such are the quirks of film distribution. Its distributors, Sideshow and Janus Films will release it next year. Thus, it must wait 12 months to occupy the top spot it richly deserves—which it will—barring a profusion of filmmaking genius in 2025.

Even so, the films that did reach U.S. screens in 2024 provided several highlights. An extraordinary, unprecedented occurrence was the sudden and rare elevation of Indian filmmaking to the most hallowed stages of world cinema. Payal Kapadia made history with All We Imagine As Light, the first Indian film to be selected in the Cannes Competition in 30 years. Perhaps its French origins helped, but...

The Montreal Critics’ Week has unveiled the lineup for its inaugural festival, which will feature 19 films across a week of programming. The first-ever edition, an initiative of the Montreal-based online magazine Panorama-cinéma, will be held at the Cinémathèque québécoise and Cinéma Moderne from Jan. 13 to Jan. 19. Along with Q&As with select filmmakers and talent, more guest speakers will be announced at a later date.

The program includes the world premiere of “Two Cuckolds Go Swimming,” a Canadian production that marks the sophomore feature of director Winston DeGiobbi. The film follows an adult film star who re-examines her life during a visit to her mother.

The festival will close with a double feature of Matthew Rankin’s Farsi-language fantasia “Universal Language,” which was recently featured on the Oscars shortlist of potential nominees for the best international feature film category, followed by the North American premiere of Abdolreza Kahani’s “A Shrine,...

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences on Tuesday unveiled the shortlist of 15 films that will vie for a nomination for the best international feature film Oscar at the 97th Academy Awards.

85 countries submitted features this award season but several frontrunners quickly pulled out from the pack, and easily made it onto the longlist, including Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, representing France, the Danish contender The Girl With the Needle from director Magnus von Horn, and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, an Iran-set feature submitted by co-production country Germany.

Several festival circuit favorites made the cut. I’m Still Here, Brazil’s contender comes to the Oscars on referral from Venice, where it won the best screenplay prize. Director Walter Salles scored an Oscar nom back in Central Station in the international category (then known as best foreign-language film), with Fernanda Montenegro, who has a cameo in I’m Still Here,...