Movies: Matthew Rankin

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 ...

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

On a secluded prairie farm, adolescent boys labor in wheat fields for a sexually predatory warden and his farmhands, who threaten to feed them to a voracious beast if they ever disobey. The newly arrived Linus instantly catches the warden's eye, and ...

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 (includ...

In Winnipeg, Nazgol and Hossein try to help a classmate recover an Iranian banknote. At the same time, a character named Matthew Rankin quits his job in Montreal to be closer to his family in Winnipeg, where he meets Massoud, a tour guide who also ta...

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....

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....

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 conse...

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

On the 25th anniversary of his employment, Dave Barber, the visionary workaholic programmer of Winnipeg's beloved Cinematheque, dies tragically in an avalanche of VHS tapes while working late to finish the programming calendar. His workaholic ghost r...

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....

This micro-epic short film is an inspired tribute to visionary avant-garde composer Walter Boudreau: his life, work, mischief, and boundless artistic curiosity. Both a documentary biopic and a wildly abstract hallucination, the film conceives of Walt...

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....

In the idealism and mutation of his home town of Winnipeg, the filmmaker Matthew Rankin launches a failed campaign of absolute inter-human solidarity entirely in Esperanto, the artificial language of world peace....

A four minute film created for the opening of the TIFF Bell Lightbox...

Set on carrying out her task with dedication, a woman is obsessed with watching over anonymous interiors and occupying them. Both a custodian of the premises and a ghostly presence, she becomes an echo of how we relate to time, solitude and the melan...

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....

A found-footage followup to Kubasa in a Glass...

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An examination of Rory Lepine, who sent Winnipeg into a frenzy when he beat local legend Burton Cummings with a beer bottle in a 7-Eleven in 1985...