Matthew Rankin

Winter. Somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg. Negin and Nazgol find a sum of money frozen deep within the sidewalk ice and try to find a way to get it out. Massoud leads a group of befuddled tourists upon an increasingly-strange walking tour of Winnipeg historic sites. Matthew leaves his job at the Québec government and embarks upon a mysterious journey to visit his estranged mother.

In space, a charming little planet named Pluto dreams of joining the Solar System’s official dance troupe. With the help of her asteroid friend, Ceres, and her human discoverer, Clyde William Tombaugh, she will do everything she can to make it happen. In this children’s film, where humans and planets share the spotlight, viewers will accompany Pluto on her quest for fame, until the moment she must face her destiny.

Toronto, Canada, 1899. William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874-1950) fervently believes that he is destined to become Prime Minister, but to do so he will first have to fight his personal obsessions and overcome the many obstacles he will encounter on his tortuous path to power.

1987: While the other students wonder if new kid Robin is a boy or a girl, Robin forges a complicated bond with the school bully, making increasingly dangerous choices to fit in.

December 31, 1999. Quebec is a few hours from year 2000 and its potential bug. Trapped in a Montreal appartement, Momo needs only one thing to survive this nightmare: couscous.

A young quebecer descends into alienation and depression.

A completely hand-made historical micro-epic about the final minutes in the life of Winnipeg's doomed Second World War hero, Andrew Mynarski (1916-1944). Combining wartime aviation melodrama with classical and avant-garde animation techniques (including stop-motion, silhouettes, bleaching, scratching, hand-painting and rubbing letratone patterns directly on the celluloid) Mynarski Death Plummet is a psychedelic photo-chemical war picture on the theme of self-sacrifice, immortality and jellyfish.

Bridgeport, January 17, 2008. A teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else. Ten years later, the director and cousin of the teenager examine the past causes and future consequences of this unsolved crime. Like an imagined biography, the film will explore the relationship between the security of the living space and the violence that can jeopardize it.

Originally released in 2006, Kubasa in a Glass presents a digitally warped reflection of Winnipeg’s brief and disposable self-image, as seen through local no-budget and public access television of the 1980s.

The camera’s roving eye seems to warp and bend a mysterious white room in this unsettling excerpt from a film Guy Maddin created for the opening of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Bell Lightbox building.

In the aftermath of the 1950 Winnipeg flood, Fernand floats listlessly through the sad, sunken landscape of ruin. His estranged wife prays for the drowned souls of Saint-Boniface.

A found footage video essay tracing Winnipeg's civic pathologies, aesthetic fabulations and exquisite strangeness through the prism of its own low-budget, lo-fi TV advertising produced between 1975 and 1992.

Wilcox exists outside the norm. Deserter, delinquent, or survivalist, he quietly roams, looking to put down roots or for what could simply be called freedom.

Two cyclists face off in a brutal cross Canada bike race.

Winnipeg Film Group. Deep in the winter of 1986. Guy Maddin is in the process of filming Tales from the Gimli Hospital and needs to rub a dead seagull on somebody's chest. Immediately, Dave Barber agrees, submitting his bare flesh to Maddin's road kill and to film history. (This film was commissioned by the Winnipeg Film Group's Cinematheque for its 25th anniversary, Silverscope)

A demented parody of the Canadian government.

New York, 1905. Visionary inventor Nikola Tesla makes one last appeal to J.P. Morgan, his onetime benefactor.

After the death of their adoptive daughter a couple goes to Haiti. There, they meet with a DNA specialist who has the power of resurrection.

Commissioned self-portrait of the artist as metaphysical remix of Abbas Kiarostami's "Close-Up" recorded on a cellphone.

Matthew spends Mother’s Day in his mom’s house slowly deleting her voicemails.