内容摘要：“Since they mostly just use their hands, they are already contaminated by touching everything from diapers to diabetes syringes,” said Bharati Chaturvedi, founder of the New Delhi-based Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group.

“Since they mostly just use their hands, they are already contaminated by touching everything from diapers to diabetes syringes,” said Bharati Chaturvedi, founder of the New Delhi-based Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group.

It’s both an extremely exact homage to the films of Kiarostami,and other Iranian masters, and a comic lament for how distant their movies might feel for a Winnipegian director. Rankin has joked that “Universal Language” brings together the rich poetry of Iranian filmmaking and a Canadian cinema that emerged “out of 50 years of discount furniture commercials.”

The gags start immediately, with an opening title logo for “A Presentation of the Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young People” — a twist on the Iranian institute that produced ’70s classics, like Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy.Like those films, Rankin’s is framed with kids. In the first scene, a displeased French teacher (Mani Soleymanlou) chastises his young students for speaking Persian. One child, an aspiring comedian. is dressed as Groucho Marx. Another says a turkey stole his glasses. Another wants to be a Winnipeg tour guide. The teacher asks them all to read from their book. In unison they read: “We are lost forever in this world.”“Universal Language,” scripted by Rankin, Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati, lightly juggles a handful of characters we intermittently check in with. That includes an adult tour guide (Pirouz Nemati), whose attractions include the site of “the Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958.” There are also two girls (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) who find a banknote frozen in ice. A character named Matthew Rankin (played by Rankin) is traveling to Winnipeg by bus to visit his ailing mother after departing his bureaucratic job in Montreal. Oh, and there are turkeys. Lots and lots of turkeys.

Rankin’s film, his second following the also surreal “Twentieth Century” (2019), is propelled less by narrative thrust than the abiding oddity of its basic construction, and the movie’s slavish devotion to seeing it through without a wink. As the movie moves along in formally composed shots, something wistful takes shape about the possibilities of connection and of insurmountable distances.I’ve twice now seen “Universal Language,” a prize-winner in Cannes’ Directors Fortnight last year that was shortlisted for the best international Oscar, and I still barely believe it exists. Rankin’s movie, in melding two worlds, risks taking place in neither, of letting its cinephile concept snuff out anything authentic. But while I’m not, at the moment, begging for a subsequent French New Wave movie set in Saskatchewan, I’ve not gone long without thinking about “Universal Language.” I guess Rankin’s movie dream has filtered into those of my own.

“Universal Language,” an Oscilloscope Laboratories. release, is not rated by the Motion Picture Association. In Farsi and French. Running time: 89 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

As they so often do in Marvel Land, worlds collide inPalestinians evacuate after the Israeli army issued an evacuation warning for several schools and a hospital in Gaza City’s Rimal neighborhood, Wednesday, May 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

Israel has vowed to facilitate what it refers to as the voluntary migration ofto other countries, which many Palestinians and others view as

Israel wants to “ensure the forced displacement of people from the area” by putting hospitals out of service, said Rami Shurafi, a board member of al-Awda hospital.The Indonesian hospital, once the largest in northern Gaza, has been surrounded by Israeli troops, who were positioned about 500 meters (545 yards) away. Drones have hovered above, monitoring any movement, since Sunday, an aid group that supports the hospital said.