A few years ago, I was making a radio segment about winter in Winnipeg, and I interviewed my dad, a born-and-raised Winnipeger, for the piece. “What are your favourite things about a Winnipeg winter?”, I asked him. He described heading home from basketball practice on freezing nights, standing next to the car in his winter coat, breathing in the icy air. “It’s a cold place,” he said, fondly. Despite everything that comes with it – mornings scraping off the car, “garbage mitts”, the endlessness of the season – there’s just something about a Winnipeg winter.
Maybe that’s why, at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, multiple directors chose to set their films against the flat snowy plains of Manitoba’s capital city. In what was overall a banner year for Manitoba cinema at TIFF, with four features and three shorts playing the festival, a few features in particular got at the heart of the warmth to be found in the famously frosty city.
In The Mother and The Bear, directed by Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Johnny Ma, we view the city through the lens of an outsider. Although her adult daughter Sumi has lived in Winnipeg for years, Sara (Kim Ho-jung) has never made the trip to visit. But when Sumi has a bad fall – precipitated by a somewhat mysterious back alley encounter – Sarra journeys to the city to be by her daughter’s side. With Sumi unconscious in the hospital, though, Sara finds herself with plenty of spare time to meddle in her daughter’s life, starting by getting on the apps to find her a nice Korean boy.
With that groundwork laid, the film plows ahead on a fairly straightforward narrative trajectory. The Mother and the Bear traffics semi-frequently in clichés in a way that is occasionally dull or groan-inducing. For example, when Sara finds a bag of unmarked gummies in her daughter’s fridge and eats them all, I felt like I saw the subsequent montage of her frolicking around the apartment, high on edibles, coming from a mile away. Nevertheless, Kim Ho-jung is thoroughly game throughout in a way that cracked my cynical exterior and left me charmed despite myself. I just wish that The Mother and the Bear had had a bit more to offer in the way of originality or surprise.
Still, there’s something about a film that’s so straightforwardly earnest. Although at times heavy-handed, it was undeniably made with heart in a way that manages to cut through the cliché. Johnny Ma’s script has a lot of fondness for its characters, and as much as it encourages us to and takes the time to round them out, complicating them into real people rather than simple caricatures. Sara is an overbearing mother, obsessed with finding a nice Korean boyfriend for her daughter, but she’s also had her own challenges in her life. She’s a fish out of water – but she’s trying! And the people she meets, in turn, meet her with compassion, despite their own complications, leading to some of the film’s best moments.
Universal Language, meanwhile, is a film that is similarly sincere, but much, much stranger. It’s a melancholy, funny, bittersweet tale of several lonely people in an alternate-reality version of Winnipeg where the two official languages are Farsi and French. It’s one of the harder-to-describe movies I watched at TIFF 2024, and one of the best, too.
This is the second feature film by director Matthew Rankin, a born-and-raised Winnipegger and cinematic oddball. You can’t help but admire the clearness of his artistic vision, which feels totally random and yet completely cohesive in the surreal urban landscape he’s dreamed up. This isn’t Winnipeg as anyone would recognize it. City neighbourhoods are organized by the colour of brick the buildings are built out of, and are populated by such strange characters and institutions as a pink-cowboy hat-wearing turkey broker and the Kleenex Repository. The film hops around its timeline as it follows several different sets of characters traipsing through this stark, snowy landscape, all on their own mundane journeys that ultimately converge in the film’s striking finale.
It’s a film that left me with as many questions as answers, both around the minute details – like, what’s going on with the man wearing a Christmas tree? – and the larger themes. For answers, one is best turning to Matthew Rankin: the director, who has spoken elsewhere about his inspirations; and the character (a self-insert of a sort, played by the director), who’s journey home from Montreal to be with his ailing mother feels key to unlocking the film’s central messages. It surely also wouldn’t hurt to have watched some of the Iranian films that Rankin in often directly referencing in Universal Language (which I have not, but am much intrigued to now!). However, as I stumbled out of the theatre, slightly dumbstruck and full of questions, what resonated then, as it does now, is the warmth at the centre of the film.
It’s something that the Mother and the Bear and Universal Language were united by, in my mind. While Universal Language feels like the more accomplished, ambitious film (It took home the Directors Fortnight program’s first Audience Award at Cannes, and it’s been named Canada’s official selection for the 2025 Academy Awards), there’s nevertheless a thread between them. Not only do they share the same location (well, more or less, given the liberties taken with Universal Language’s depiction of Winnipeg), but they share the same basic philosophy that, even in such a cold place, there is much kindness and connection to be found, and perhaps even be made sweeter by the icy landscape they’re found in. Whether the film positing it is a screwball indie fish-out-of water story, or a surreal high-concept piece of experimental cinema, it’s an idea I can get behind.
