Two Winnipeg filmmakers gathered in Toronto last week to discuss their latest works and their relationship to their hometown and its anti-mainstream film scene. Matthew Rankin, whose “Universal Language” now represents Canada in the Best International Feature Film Oscar race, was joined by Canadian auteur Guy Maddin at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival for a dialogue about their filmmaking.
Guy Maddin co-directed the 2024 film “Rumours” with Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, and the political satire has played festivals far and wide, from Cannes to TIFF. Rankin won the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award at Cannes for his absurdist triptych comedy that riffs on Wes Anderson while homaging Abbas Kiarostami. Rankin’s Oscilloscope release (out early next year) connects three seemingly unrelated stories about people in Winnipeg whose ordinary lives take a surreal turn.
Both Maddin and Rankin shared in their desire not to be pigeonholed into genre. Though Rankin is only on his second feature after the German Expressionist-inspired “Twentieth Century,” Maddin has long been known for his boundary-pushing work in installation work and on screens in films that pay tribute to everything from the silent era to the avant-garde. Rankin, meanwhile, is in the Oscar running for the first time. His film “The Twentieth Century” (2019) was nominated for eight Canadian Screen Awards and won three; prior to that, Rankin mostly worked in avant-garde and short film and in a style that surely owes an aesthetic debt to “My Winnipeg” director Maddin.
“I have big cinematic appetites. I’ve done a lot of animation, I’ve done some documentary, I’ve done some fiction, and the new piece is in Farsi, it’s sort of a declaration of love to Iranian cinema,” Rankin said. “Like any love letter, you send it and you hope the person who receives it will find you to be enchanting and beautiful and accept you for all your flaws and inadequacies and mistakes. But there’s also the chance that the person who receives it will reject you and send you hate mail. We’ll see how it goes!”
Maddin said, “I wanted to believe that I would love the movie. I was just wondering how Matthew would pull off this strange hybrid of Winnipeg love letter all in Persian. Like reimagining Winnipeg as a Persian city and on a modest budget. It’s not $100 million anyway. The hybrid is so unlikely that it’s the best since bacon and peanut butter. It really works. The defamiliarizing of a city I am all too familiar with — I have had my grave backhoed open there already — just seeing it as very dreamlike, it really gets airborne in ways I never expected. I’m getting goosebumps just describing it right now.”
As the conversation went on for a full hour, Rankin and Maddin were able to dig into some fun stories from their years on the film scene — including one involving Susan Sarandon in town in Winnipeg to shoot “Shall We Dance?”
“Susan Sarandon was there for two months or something, and every day, there was a report about her activity: What did she think of the Winnipeg zoo? How did she feel when the mayor gave her the key to the city? How does the TGI Friday’s in Winnipeg compare to the one in Beverly Hills?” Rankin said. “After a few weeks of this, her earrings were stolen. She had some heirloom earrings and they were stolen.”
“I was told they were costume jewelry for the movie, but it was still worth $40,000,” Maddin said. “Stolen out of her trailer.”
“The next day on the cover of one of the newspapers, there was a massive article, and it was like one of these columnists saying, ‘Just when a real celebrity comes to Winnipeg and has a chance to see what we’re really all about, someone has to ruin it for everybody. Whoever stole Madam Sarandon’s earrings better return them right away, or you will face the wrath of an angry city.”
“We were all pretty ashamed,” Maddin said.
“And then two days later, they were found on a severed head,” Rankin said.
According to Maddin, “The thief went back to the Royal Albert hotel or whatever it was, and then picked up somebody, and then there was so much excitement over the pickup and the theft of all this jewelry that things got carried away, and the body was chopped up into many pieces. Excitement carried to through its logical but heinous extreme. But then the perp made the short walk from the Royal Albert to the police station and turned himself in.”
“It’s a very grizzly and horrible story, but at the same time, it’s sort of Winnipeg just longing to be normal and be accepted in the mainstream and having all of its pathologies just blow up in its face,” Rankin said.
Watch a clip from the conversation in the video, an IndieWire exclusive, above.
“Universal Language” will open from Oscilloscope Laboratories in early 2025 after a qualifying awards run in the fall. “Rumours” will open from Bleecker Street on October 11.