Sandra Oh and Anne Marie Fleming unite for subtle dystopia in Can I Get a Witness? | Canada Voices

Director Ann Marie Fleming and actor Sandra Oh first met in the 1990s working on a film in which Oh was cast as the daughter in a mother-daughter story. The project was never realized; Fleming went on to become a celebrated animator and Oh went on to become a Hollywood star. Now, three decades later, they have finally completed a mother-daughter movie – except this time Oh plays the mother.

Can I Get a Witness? is a futuristic tale in which the world has been rescued from climate catastrophe by banning cars and cellphones – and killing all citizens when they reach age 50. Keira Jang plays Kiah, a young woman with a new job witnessing the farewell ceremonies and government-assisted deaths. Oh plays her middle-aged mother, gently helping her daughter confront the realities of dying.

“It’s presented as a fable and within that fable is a fantasy mom,” Oh said of her wise and calm character in a recent interview. “If you could, in the moment that your child really needed you, put aside your own feelings and just be there completely present for your child in something very difficult that they have to go through – that’s how I approached it.”

Fleming, also participating by video call, said she had the idea for the script in December 2006, when a windstorm destroyed more than 10,000 old-growth trees in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. At the same time, there was talk of raising the minimum age for the Canada Pension Plan from 65 to 67.

“In the many years since then, there’s been COVID, where we’ve all seen how governments can move. There’s medical assistance in dying all over the world and in Canada, and we are all affected by extreme weather events,” she said.

The film begins with a scene of a raging forest fire. While the story focuses tightly on personal relationships, the implications of the subtle dystopia that Fleming has created reverberate on a mighty scale.

She compares her script to A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, the 18th-century Irish writer who suggested the potato famine could be fixed if the Irish ate their children, thus cutting down on their population and providing them with protein.

“It was a harsh farce,” Fleming said. “People got very angry, but things were changed. The focus went to the place where it should have gone, which was on these predatory landowner practices and the suffering of the Irish.”

For Oh, who turned 53 last summer, death is the major issue that Fleming raises.

“It’s a really great opportunity as an artist to be asked to think about your mortality,” she said. “I think all people should do it, but I do it for my job, so there’s a lot of safety within that.”

To keep the film focused on these emotions – and to remind the viewer that it is a fable – Fleming added small amounts of animation. Flowers bloom; a boy in a wheelchair flies away on wings. These also reflect Kiah’s role at the farewell ceremonies: In a world that has banned digital photography, she sketches portraits of those about to die.

Fleming background is as a visual artist: Half of the titles in her filmography are animation. She previously worked with Oh on 2016′s Window Horses, in which Oh voiced a stick figure named Rosie Ming who travels to a poetry festival in Iran.

“When I worked with Sandra on Window Horses, she was a voice. Here I get her body as well, but the process for her is the same. She goes into such depth to know her character and to know the story world.”

Oh figures that she and Fleming spent at least a year honing the script and have never had a conversation that lasted less than 90 minutes as they hash out issues on the page and in life.

“She writes something, and then we really discuss it,” Oh said. “She’s very collaborative that way, very open and very fluid. She’s also very emotional. She doesn’t really have to talk much because I can feel very deeply where she might be. … The way she has moved herself, I can register it and bring it into my own body. I don’t have to reach too far to come into the state of the character.”

Both women describe the relationship as one of trust – an important foundation to have as the cast and crew addressed difficult but topical material.

Fleming is hoping her film will get people talking: “I don’t just make films. I don’t want to sound pompous here, but for me, this is an action. These are things that I really care about, and I want to have a conversation with everybody who sees this film. These are the issues of our lives.”

Film Review

Can I Get a Witness?

Written and directed by Ann Marie Fleming

Starring Sandra Oh, Joel Oulette and Keira Jang

Classification N/A; 110 minutes

Opens in select theatres March 14

Critic’s Pick

Ann Marie Fleming’s new film Can I Get a Witness? is both utopian and dystopian. It is set in a future where there is neither war nor poverty and nature flourishes, but the world has been rescued by ridding it of all cars, all digital technology and … everybody over 50. It is the job of the young to oversee government-assisted death once a citizen reaches that age.

In a gracious performance delicately investigating mortality, bereavement and grief, Sandra Oh plays Ellie, a middle-aged single mother supporting her artistic daughter Kiah (Keira Jang), who is starting a new job attending the farewell ceremonies and deaths of the elders. Kiah’s task is to sketch their final portraits because photography is environmentally verboten.

Jang and Joel Oulette, playing her cheery colleague Daniel, are assigned the role of wide-eyed young people who can’t remember international travel or cellphones. Daniel is a committed advocate of the killing system that has saved the planet; Kiah has some questions, but both deliver fine performances of characters amusingly blind to irony.

The only two movies available in this post-digital world are Zoolander and the Marx Brothers’ political comedy Duck Soup: “It’s a satire,” Ellie explains to her uncomprehending daughter. So, in its way, is this clever yet touching look at what ails our current world – although Fleming has labelled her film a fable, a point she delicately underlines with small touches of animation throughout.