It’s difficult to find suitable words to describe Matthew Rankin’s Persian-language, Canadian film, without diminishing its original vision and singular whimsicality. It’s peopled with quirky characters who are also as ordinary as they come. It’s situated in an unusual space where Tehran and Winnipeg collide and conjoin, yet it feels like a friendly neighbourhood world that could be right outside your own doorstep.
Here time sets aside its own essential linearity as past, present, and future roll into each other. Yet there’s consonance and interconnectedness in the seemingly divergent and deviating narratives and a thread of realism that runs right through the fanciful, fablesque form. A lot appears to happen all at once.
A turkey runs away with a child’s spectacles. His friends Negin and Nazgol go on the lookout for it, chance upon money frozen in ice and go on a mission to find an axe or shovel to dig it out with. Quite like the child’s quest to return the school notebook back to his classmate in Abbas Kiarostami’s 1987 film, Meanwhile, travel guide Massoud, who is always wearing earmuffs, takes utterly disinterested tour groups through the most uncelebrated sites of Winnipeg.
Meanwhile, Matthew decides to quit his job with the government of Quebec in Montreal to come back home to his long-forgotten and ailing mother in Winnipeg. Without them being aware of it, all these characters, their relationships and their lives are bound to each other in unforeseen bu.
