Universal Language

 The spirit of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi's cinema intersects with the everyday absurdity of David Byrne's True Stories in a Winnipeg community that seems to have sprung from Wes Anderson's imagination in Universal Language, a wonderful Canadian extravaganza concocted by Matthew Raskin that generated fascination at the Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight, where it won the newly established Audience Award. A teacher who is always getting irritated by his pupils, some girls who have found a frozen ticket in the snow, another boy who complains that a turkey stole his glasses, a lady who specialises in tears, a somewhat heterodox guide and a civil servant eager to return home all intersect in this vision of a Canada where Farsi is the common language and where the inhabitants carry on typically Iranian habits. Far from remaining merely eccentric, Raskin subverts notions of foreignness and familial belonging, while injecting a profound human warmth into the frozen landscapes of Manitoba.