Matthew Rankin was born in Winnipeg and now lives in Montréal. He is the director of some 40 short films and two features, working in photochemical hybrids of documentary, fiction and animation preoccupied with history and the biographical form. His work has been presented at Sundance, SXSW, New York Film Festival, TIFF, Annecy, the Berlinale, Cannes Critics Week, Cannes Directors Fortnight, and on the Criterion Channel. His first feature, The Twentieth Century (2019), was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize of the International Film Critics at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival, and his second long-format fiction, Une langue universelle (2024), was awarded the Chantal Ackerman Prize at Cannes Directors Fortnight and the Bright Horizons Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
While at MacDowell in 2013, Matthew wrote a draft of his forthcoming Antarctic disaster epic, entitled The Worst Journey, as well as the original story outline for what would become Une langue universelle. Back in Schelling Studio in 2021, he composed an elaborate outline based on years of historical research for a script about the founding of the City of Winnipeg, Three Scoundrels of the Assiniboine. He is presently hard at work on an Esperanto-language docufiction with sculptor Ila Firouzabadi, Kongreso, and an all-archival documentary about the political vocation of Brian Mulroney.
