Asian Canadian award-winning filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming’s film stars Sandra Oh and Keira Jang
Following a successful Canadian film festival run including its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September 2024, Asian Canadian filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming’s latest project Can I Get A Witness? .
Described as an environmental film with a gentle, yet dark humour, the film stars Sandra Oh (The Sympathizer, Killing Eve), Keira Jang (The Batwoman, Riverdale) and Joel Oulette (Trickster, Monkey Beach).
The film takes place in the near-future, where climate change is mitigated, global poverty is eradicated, and all species on the planet can live in relative peace and equality. How? Because in this film, the world agreed that human life ends at 50.
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Fresh out of school, Kiah (Keira Jang), a gifted artist, lives at home with her doting mother, Ellie (Sandra Oh). It’s Kiah’s first day of work as a “Documentor,” a Witness who draws End-of-Life (EOL) protocols for the New World Order.
Kiah has never witnessed death, yet tries her hand at her first set of EOL drawings of the 50-year-olds who stoically repress their feelings.
While Kiah and Daniel (Joel Oulette), Kiah’s Documentor mentor were born after “The Agreement”, Kiah’s subjects all remember a world where medicine, infrastructure and money could keep people alive upwards of 90. But now everyone is committed to this new global expiry date. Or are they? Kiah’s drawings literally come to life – animate off the page – expressing the underlying emotions of the moment.
EXCLUSIVE CLIP PREMIERE: Sandra Oh and Keira Jang in Ann Marie Fleming’s “Can I Get A Witness?”
Watch this exclusive new clip from Can I Get A Witness? .
In this clip, Sandra Oh (Ellie) and Keira Jang (Kiah), Oh’s character gives her daughter a gift. “How could you even think of me at a time like this?” asks Kiah.
“Are you kidding? I have been thinking of you every second of your life,” says Ellie. “Having a kid, it’s like having your heart walk around outside your body.”
In addition to the unique nature of the telling of this future world, the themes of family and mother and daughter relationships will also resonate with viewers.
Can I Get A Witness? is a meditation on death
While many films depicting the future are often set with immersive and innovative technology, Fleming imagines the future in a slower and more minimalist way.
Both Oh and Jang note that the film is not dystopian, it’s more like a fable of the future as well as a meditation on death.
For Jang, the message’s message is clear: “I think this film shows a possibility of what might happen…I hope this film leads people to just take a second and think about Climate Change and what impact it is having…for my generation, it’s something that is constantly on our minds.”
Throughout her nearly-40-year career, Oh was drawn to the script: “I had never read anything like (this script) before.”
“I had never read a piece that was really trying to start a conversation about death. If something is about death, we’re still so afraid of it that we have to make sure that there’s a hopeful element. And I think anyone who actually has witnessed, with their whole self, the experience of someone passing, you don’t need hope because it just is right…. I think that’s really what the film is addressing, something we really don’t have in the Western culture, just to come to being present with the reality that we are going to die. That’s what I’m hopeful for,” shares the award-winning Korean Canadian-American actor.
“I felt that Ann Marie was touching on, in numerous places, extremely profound and tender spots about what it is to be human,” says Oh.
The creative vision behind Can I Get A Witness?
Filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming is an award-winning visual artist, writer, director, animator and multimedia creative of Chinese, Japanese, Australian and Canadian descent and currently calls Vancouver home.
Can I Get a Witness? was originally conceived in 2006, after a devastating windstorm levelled 41 hectares of forest in Vancouver’s iconic Stanley Park.
“I was living in Vancouver and thinking about tsunamis and windstorms and drought,” Fleming recalls. This natural phenomenon, followed by the global pandemic in 2020, Fleming considered a range of ethical questions about global events. “Regardless of where you were, what your economic status was, or what your culture was. We were all living the same thing at the same time.”
Now that global warming and the resulting climate crisis are also having a world-wide effect, the underlying message of “Can I Get A Witness?” has taken on a greater relevance, Fleming explains.
“We can all see that the world is on fire right now, but we’re experiencing it in different ways. And so we feel more or less vulnerable depending on where we are in the world, what our social status is, what our geography is. It’s allowing people to understand what I’m trying to say with this film.”
The film was recognized by TIFF as one of Canada’s Top Ten films of the 2024 festival.
Watch Can I Get A Witness? in select Canadian theatres starting March 14th.
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