The second feature by Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin (‘The Twentieth Century’) won the first-ever Directors’ Fortnight audience award in Cannes.

Newsflash: Iran has invaded the sleepy Canadian city of Winnipeg. Correction: Iranian cinema has actually invaded Winnipeg. Precision: Two Iranian movies that launched the nation onto the international film scene, Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) and Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon (1995), have somehow found their way into the capital of Manitoba.

We’re in snow-covered Winnipeg, which half-resembles the drab, midsized Canadian city, and half looks like a neigborhood somewhere in Tehran — not present-day Tehran, but Tehran circa the 1980s and 90s. The signage is all in Farsi, there’s an outdoor market attached to an industrial warehouse where you can buy old typewriters or vacuum cleaners, chickens are wandering around in the snow, and the local branch of Tim Horton’s serves donuts and Persian specialties. What the hell is going on here?

Rankin’s feature debut, The Twentieth Century, was already a homage to old movies, recreating Hollywood Golden Age musicals by way of the frenzied retro montages of Guy Maddin (like Rankin, a native Winnipegger).

The style in Universal Language is worlds apart from that film. Cinematographer Isabelle Stachtchenko mimics the grainy, static 16mm look of Kiarostami’s early work, which was funded by Iran’s Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (whose logo Rankin even copies in the opening credits). Set designer Louisa Schabas inserts Farsi advertising wherever she can, whether on park benches, shopping mall billboards, local TV commercials or by transforming the original Tim Horton’s logo familiar to every Canadian.

Some peole will enjoy Universal Language just by sifting through all these strange details, but Rankin also includes a minimalist plot where he plays a local, also named Matthew Rankin, arriving back in Winnipeg after living for years in Montreal.

Rankin never takes things quite that far here, and his new film is much less of a drama than a quirky, deadpan comedy with a few standout moments — such as a scene where Massoud gives a tour of a depressing Winnipeg mall fountain as if he were presenting some kind of major revolutionary monument.

By converting his drab hometown into an exotic land filled with nostalgia (albeit a very niche nostalgia, primarily for Criterion Channel subscribers), Rankin seems to be seeking out the universal language of cinema itself. In his own very weird way he manages to find it, turning an everyday place into something momentarily special — which is what all good movies are supposed to do.