Universal Language: The Film.

Saleem Vaillancourtaz writes in LRB blog about a movie I’d definitely like to see:

‘I always like to say that Iranian cinema emerges out of a thousand years of poetry, and Canadian cinema emerges out of fifty years of discount furniture commercials,’ Matthew Rankin said at a recent screening of his movie Universal Language. I come from both countries, but it’s the furniture gag that struck home. Written by Rankin, Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, the film is set in a version of Canada where the official languages are French and Persian. Buildings are covered with Persian signs (one says ‘Robert H. Smith School’); carts sell cooked beets, an old Iranian staple.

When I spoke with Rankin and Nemati after the screening, they said the movie is neither Iranian nor Canadian (though it’s Canada’s submission for Best International Feature at the Oscars). Nemati, who plays a tour guide showing visitors around Winnipeg (‘this is one of the first residential structures in the historic beige district’), recalled the praise offered by one ‘Iranian grandma’ at a Toronto screening. ‘She wasn’t a cinephile, but she said she just felt the film,’ that it connected people during a time of ‘distance’. Universal Language is not didactic, Rankin said, but ‘the experience of watching it does propose a way of looking at the world, and I think that’s what people respond to.’[…]

‘I liked that there was this strange echo on the other side of the world,’ he said, between his family’s history and Iranian cinema. I suggested that Universal Language speaks to the strand in Iranian culture that uses the particular to speak to the universal. The ‘Iranian-ness’ in the film ‘is not really Iranian-ness’, Nemati replied. He mentioned the Saadi poem at the entrance to the United Nations building in New York. ‘Persian poetry became universal because it wasn’t Iranian any more,’ he said. ‘Winnipeg, in Persian, loses itself and finds itself again.’

According to Rankin, the film inhabits ‘this new third space … at the confluence of different stories and experiences and understandings and baggage, and that’s what’s fun about the movie. It doesn’t belong in one Tupperware container that is sealed off from all other Tupperware containers.’

An Iranianized version of Canada — what a great concept for a movie!

Comments

  1. J.W. Brewer says

    Seeing how google translate does in rendering echt-Canadian texts into Farsi:

    موس فک چند تا دید، موسومین هم
    در حال دویدن به ساسکاتون
    گوزن قرمز، تراس و کلاه پزشکی
    آهنگ دشتی دیگر بخوان

  2. David Marjanović says

    carts sell cooked beets, an old Iranian staple

    Has the potato not made it to…

  3. David Eddyshaw says

    Go Canada!

  4. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I would like to take this opportunity to strongly recommend Guy Maddin’s film My Winnipeg. It’s a fancifully autobiographical pseudo-documentary that almost succeeds in making you believe that the imaginary title city is a real place.

  5. J.W. Brewer says

    That UN-connected poem is explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bani_Adam#United_Nations_connection

    Note that an early envoy from the Peacock Throne to the League of Nations had been pitching it for this sort of usage way back in the 1920’s but it took quite some time before the pitch succeeded.

  6. @David L — more real than Bielefeld, even?!

  7. Roberto Batisti says

    Re: Bielefeld, Winnipeg, you guys may have non-existent cities, but we boast a whole non-existent region: Molisn’t.

  8. PlasticPaddy says

    https://nonciclopedia.org/wiki/Molise
    (For those not on facebook)
    Nonciclopedia also has a good article on Bergamo (or Bergamaschi), recently mentioned on another thread.

  9. That would explain why I can never remember where the stress goes (for the record, it’s penultimate: [moˈliːze]).

  10. From the Wikipedia article: “The region is split into two provinces, named after their capitals: Campobasso and Isernia.” Come on, there are no such cities.

  11. And one of the “Main dishes of the region” is “Calcioni di ricotta, a specialty of Campobasso, made of fried pasta stuffed with ricotta, provolone, prosciutto, and parsley, and usually served with fried artichokes, cauliflower, brains, sweetbread, potato croquette, and scamorza cheese.” Sure, like that’s a real thing.

  12. Roberto Batisti says

    Nonciclopedia also has a good article on Bergamo (or Bergamaschi), recently mentioned on another thread.

    Due to personal reasons, I know that city quite well and hold a soft spot for it in my heart; I can thereby confirm that the Nonciclopedia article is 200% factual truth.

  13. I love the “Lingue e dialetti” section:

    Nonostante il dialetto fiorentino sia stato crudelmente imposto alla popolazione come lingua ufficiale, l’uso del gaelico bergamasco è ancora di gran lunga preferito e tutt’ora utilizzato in molti aspetti della quotidianità, nonché nei rapporti interpersonali. Mutualmente intellegibile con il gaelico irlandese e scozzese, come affermato più volte dall’oste Umberto Bossi; molto usata nel bergamasco è la bestemmia, soprattutto l’Ostia che immancabilmente apre e chiude ogni frase. Essendo una lingua tonale, gli sproloqui risultano di fondamentale importanza per i muratori, clan di maggioranza a Bergamo, i quali, immaginandone un’ipotetica assenza, sarebbero vittima di continui misunderstanding causando effetti catastrofici nella quotidianità: basti pensare che un piccolo cambiamento di accento sulla “I” di “Dio” potrebbe modificare il significato della frase da «Tira la malta fina, ostia» in «Ostia, passami la cazzuola».

  14. David Marjanović says

    come affermato più volte dall’oste Umberto Bossi

    I can’t put it beyond him, but did he really…?

    (Very guttural… uh…)

  15. You’re reading Nonciclopedia, which is a cross between Wikipedia and The Onion.

  16. David Marjanović says

    I know; that’s why I ask. The genre not only makes shit up, but also uses the funniest TRUFAX straight, and I haven’t been following the Lega’s antics.

  17. David Eddyshaw says

    I did notice the Gaelic when I was last in Bergamo. I thought nothing of it at the time, but I had had a bad night and was quite sleepy.

    Bergamo is particularly memorable to me as the place where my wife began her career as an international criminal.

  18. Roberto Batisti says

    Very guttural languages the two of them the Gaelic and the Bergamask

  19. a version of Canada where the official languages are French and Persian

    Marde et مرد mard… voilà une fâcheuse proximité phonétique.

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