Oscilloscope Laboratories today announced the U.S. release date for Universal Language, the latest feature from visionary director Matthew Rankin, set to debut in select theaters on February 12, 2025. Winner of the inaugural Audience Award at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Universal Language is also Canada’s official submission for Best International Feature Film at the upcoming 97th Academy Awards. The film is eligible for all 2024 honors, having completed a one-week qualifying run earlier this year.

Directed by Rankin and co-written with Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, Universal Language marks Rankin’s second feature after the critically acclaimed The Twentieth Century (2019).

“The premise of our movie is working from a position of no borders and absolute belonging. In a time of increasingly rigid binaries and fulminating reactions, we hope our movie stands witness to the fundamental capacity of people – between whom you might imagine great distance – to create a gentle world together and even have a few laughs before the sun goes down. Universal Language was made by a group of very close and very crazy friends and our prismatic, interdimensional Venn diagram of Winnipeg within Tehran within Montréal is an expression of our friendship and our lives together. Cinema must provide new ways of imagining the absurd and beautiful and very limited time we have to be alive here in this world; it’s something art can do which politics and ideology and online trolling plainly cannot. To us, Universal Language is a modest gesture of radical gentleness and we can’t wait to share it with you.” – Matthew Rankin, Director

In a mysterious and surreal interzone somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg, the lives of multiple characters interweave with each other in surprising and mysterious ways. Grade-schoolers Negin and Nazgol find a sum of money frozen in the winter ice and try to claim it. Meanwhile, Massoud leads a group of increasingly befuddled tourists through the monuments and historic sites of Winnipeg. Matthew quits his meaningless job in a Québécois government office and sets out upon an enigmatic journey to visit his mother. Space, time and personal identities crossfade, interweave and echo into a surreal comedy of misdirection.