Leading Lights | VIFF 2025

A celebrated Canadian filmmaker curates a selection of international films that influenced their artistic journey

Across some 50 years of time and multiple border walls, these films — with poetry and with humour — explore themes of lonesomeness, alienation, political turmoil, the manufacturing of contempt, and the artificiality of image-making. In brief: our world today! But these films also contain something very precious, and that something is tenderness. These films all ask us a question that preoccupies me greatly as both a filmmaker and as a person, a question that is as vital as it is absurd: In this most cruel of all possible worlds, how do we build spaces of love?

— Matthew Rankin, Guest Programmer

Full Curatorial Statement

I am so humbled by this sweet invitation to guest-curate VIFF’s 2025 Leading Lights program. As a filmmaker working in Canada, I think VIFF is just the best thing going. In a cultural sector increasingly stressed out by commercial imperatives, VIFF has remained so deeply committed to art and the belief that sharing art makes us feel alive. I’m absolutely delighted to be part of this year’s event.

I’ve been asked to share with you four international films that inspired my second feature, Universal Language (2024). The list of inspirations for that film is LONG but I’ve chiseled it down to: a metaphysical poem by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, A Moment of Innocence (Iran, 1996); a proletarian noir by Aki Kaurismäki, Lights in the Dusk (Finland, 2006); a set of deadpan tableaux by Elia Suleiman, Divine Intervention (Palestine, 2002); and a structuralist essay-film by Chantal Akerman, News from Home (Belgium, 1976). I love all these films very dearly and I’m so excited to watch them with you.

Across some 50 years of time and multiple border walls, these films — with poetry and with humour — explore themes of lonesomeness, alienation, political turmoil, the manufacturing of contempt, and the artificiality of image-making. In brief: our world today! But they also contain something very precious, and that something is tenderness. These films ask a question that preoccupies me greatly as a filmmaker, a question as vital as it is absurd: In this most cruel of all possible worlds, how do we build spaces of love?

— Matthew Rankin

Matthew Rankin

Matthew Rankin grew up in Winnipeg and studied history at McGill and Université Laval. He is the director of some 40 short films and two features, including The Twentieth Century (2019), which was awarded the FIPRESCI prize at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival, and Universal Language (2024), which was awarded the Chantal Akerman Prize at the 2024 Cannes Directors Fortnight. He is hard at work on his third feature in Montréal.