Winner of the inaugural Directors’ Fortnight audience award at Cannes this year, Matthew Rankin’s follow-up to his eccentric, surreal The Twentieth Century (TIFF ’19) is a gentle sort of comedy, settling us down in a reimagined Canada where Persian and French are the two official languages… and loneliness is the common currency. 

In Winnipeg, children set themselves on eccentric quests — or dress like Groucho Marx — to flummox the adults around them, occasionally disrupting a tour group led by the flustered Massoud (Pirouz Nemati) as he does his best to explain the city’s curious landmarks. 

Meanwhile, in Montreal, government wonk Matthew (played by Rankin himself) quits a job he hates and catches the first bus home to Manitoba to see his mother, only to find his family is not what he thought it was. 

The films of Abbas Kiarostami and his New Iranian Cinema contemporary Mohsen Makhmalbaf are Rankin’s most obvious touchstones here, but Festival audiences will also recognize the influence of the Swedish absurdist Roy Andersson and the ’Peg’s own Guy Maddin, all filtered through Rankin’s deadpan comic sensibility. He’s traded the gleeful depravity of The Twentieth Century for something kinder and softer, an affectionate look at a diasporic nation trying to fit itself into a box that can’t contain it. Don’t worry, people still congregate at Tim Hortons. (Always Fresh!) It’s just that their idea of a double-double is a little different.