Matthew Rankin, BA’01, was surprised when his film Universal Language was chosen to represent Canada in this year’s Oscar race for Best International Feature Film.
“When we finished it, we really loved it,” he says. “We were like, if this only ever plays at a real estate seminar, that will be fine.”
More seriously, he says, “I don’t like being the centre of attention. I don’t like red carpets. I don’t like getting dressed up, but we made a film as a real community. This is really nice insofar as it’s an acknowledgment of how the film connected to people.”
The movie certainly has been connecting with audiences as well as film critics. When it premiered last year at the Cannes Film Festival, it won the inaugural Director’s Fortnight Audience Award. It’s gone on to win prizes at festivals in Hamburg, Melbourne, Ghent, Nashville, Stockholm, Toronto, Valladolid, Vancouver, Calgary and Thessaloniki. The influential National Board of Review in the U.S. named Universal Language one of the best international films of 2024.
For Rankin, the film doesn’t belong to just him, and he’s happy to share the accolades. “That’s everybody’s achievement and that’s a beautiful thing.”
A student of Canadian history with a passion for Iranian cinema, Rankin’s film reimagines Canada as a country where the two solitudes are no longer English and French, but French and Persian.
Set between Montreal and Winnipeg, the film follows a dual narrative of young Persian children trying to retrieve money (in this fantasy Canada, Louis Riel adorns our paper bills) trapped in the ice, while a Quebec bureaucrat (played by Rankin) travels from Montreal to Winnipeg to visit his mother.
“I think Canada is a place that can be perpetually redefined, and it should be. When we redefine it, we can make it something new.”
Filmmaker Mathew Rankin
A passion for history
When Rankin started at McGill, he majored in English lit. “When I arrived in Montreal, I didn’t speak French,” he says. “Within the first two weeks, I came to the conclusion that everything that was really exciting to me about Montreal would require me to learn French. I started to learn very actively.”
He also decided to switch his major. “I ended up studying Quebec history.”
Moving from Winnipeg to Montreal was like stepping into a historical moment.
“There was a lot of post-referendum malaise when I was there and there’s something about that atmosphere that led me on this path,” he explains. Rankin was already making films during his time at McGill, though he did it more as a creative pursuit, than with an actual career in mind. “I learned how to edit [in a McGill course] with the late, great Brian Morel,” he says.
Rankin continued his education in history at Université de Laval for a master’s degree, but when it came to getting a PhD, it occurred to him that he didn’t want to be an academic.
“I was very interested in what I was studying,” says Rankin, “but I came to the conclusion that my relationship to history was not a scientific one. I was interested in things that could only be measured in art. I decided to be an artist. I took a vow of poverty, went back to Winnipeg, and just did art for three years and eventually worked my way back here.”
After making some award-winning short films, Rankin’s first feature film was released in 2019. The Twentieth Century reinterprets former Canadian prime minister William Mackenzie King’s rise to power. It was nominated for eight Canadian Screen Awards, winning three.
Inspired by earlier cinematic avant-garde and the aesthetics of Expo 67, The Twentieth Century was a visionary exploration of history. The New York Times described it as “an exuberant feat of visual design” and “a feverish reimagining of turn-of-the-20th-century Canada.”

“History has been a thread throughout all my work as a filmmaker,” Rankin says. “Its origins were really my days as a young history student at McGill. It’s this idea of putting the past and putting reality into a form and giving it a cinematic image.”
Rankin has a uniquely playful approach to dealing with the past in his films – The Twentieth Century, for instance, is a far cry from most biopics.
“I think of it as looking at the codes in a new way,” says Rankin. “I think Canada is a place that can be perpetually redefined, and it should be. When we redefine it, we can make it something new.”
Universal Language(s)
Universal Language reimagines a version of Canada where one of our official languages is Farsi, rather than English.
“I did a class at McGill in the Islamic Studies [institute], that’s where I learned to read Farsi and write it,” says Rankin. Learning it as an ongoing process. “It’s my weakest language.”
He has taken several trips to Iran and spends time with Iranian friends, but “they’re so eloquent in English and French, I just end up defaulting to English. It’s a slow process.”
Rankin has a passion for languages. He often thinks of how arriving in Montreal to study at McGill changed the trajectory of his life.
“I arrive in this city, and I can’t speak French, but I can take French classes, I can go out in the city and practice every day.” He is no fan of the CAQ government policies that make it more difficult for out-of-province students to attend English language universities in Quebec. “I wouldn’t have learned French if I had not gone to McGill,” he says.
If Rankin was younger and only starting his undergraduate studies now, he isn’t so sure he would have attended McGill the way things stand today. “I love Quebec history, I love speaking French and I wouldn’t want these things to not be part of my life,” he says. “Life began for me in Winnipeg, and I will always have a relationship with that city, but Montreal is the identity I’ve chosen.”