Matthew Rankin is a Montréal based filmmaker and esperantist. His short Mynarski Death Plummet won the experimental animation prize at the Annecy international animation festival in France, 2015. His film The Twentieth Century (2019) was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize of the International Film Critics at the 2020 Berlinale and his 4-part experimental documentary series Notre Mulroney, about the political vocation of Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, was produced at the National Film Board of Canada.
At MacDowell in 2013, he wrote a complete first draft of his feature-length Antarctic historical fantasia, The Worst Journey in the World, for which he was the recipient of a major award from the Canada Council for the Arts. He also completed the final draft of an Iranian neo-realist screenplay, Akhavan, which went into production in 2014.
During his 2020 residency, Rankin synthesized many months of historical research and composed an elaborate, 50,000-word treatment for a biographical film, tentatively named Three Scoundrels of the Assiniboine.
