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!
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
Has the potato not made it to…
Go Canada!
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.
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.
@David L — more real than Bielefeld, even?!
Re: Bielefeld, Winnipeg, you guys may have non-existent cities, but we boast a whole non-existent region: Molisn’t.
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.
That would explain why I can never remember where the stress goes (for the record, it’s penultimate: [moˈliːze]).
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.
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.
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.
I love the “Lingue e dialetti” section:
I can’t put it beyond him, but did he really…?
(Very guttural… uh…)
You’re reading Nonciclopedia, which is a cross between Wikipedia and The Onion.
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.
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.
Very guttural languages the two of them the Gaelic and the Bergamask
a version of Canada where the official languages are French and Persian
Marde et مرد mard… voilà une fâcheuse proximité phonétique.