Ab Film Review & The Last New Wave

Matthew Rankin is a Canadian filmmaker who hails from Winnipeg, Manitoba. His work, which includes the acclaimed award-winning 2019 feature The Twentieth Century, has often been called 'experimental' or a slice of 'absurdist comedy'. That's partially true, but I'd go a step further and say that there's a touch of humanist storytelling to his work, one that's crafted from a globalist perspective. That mindset is accentuated with Rankin's latest film, the tender and superb Universal Language, a Canadian film where characters speak in Persian rather than English or French, where a guide shows a group of bored tourists the banal sites of Winnipeg, where turkey shop owners wear pink cowboy hats, and where two young kids, Negin (played by Rojinia Esmaeili) and Nazgol (played by Saba Vahedyousefi), find money frozen in ice and seek a way to retrieve it so they can buy their classmate a new pair of glasses.This is our world knocked off its axis ever so slightly. It's a place which is familiar, yet distinctly differen