In my film, everyone chooses to die at 50 because it's the only way to save the world

Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This TIFF 2024 edition by director Ann Marie Fleming focuses on her film Can I Get a Witness?.

Can I Get A Witness? is a film about a near future in which we have all decided that, in order to mitigate climate change, end world poverty and have true trans-species democracy, we will all end our lives at 50. Technology like photography has also been banned, so teenagers who have artistic inclinations sketch our end-of-life protocols like courtroom illustrators. And it's a young person named Kiah's first day on the job.

I used to live in Vancouver's West End, where I'd often find myself angsting about potential earthquakes and tsunamis. Then, in 2006, more than 10,000 trees blew down overnight in Stanley Park. Around the same time, I was listening to CBC Radio and heard someone talking about raising the CPP eligibility age by a couple of years, since we didn't have the tax base to pay for our aging population. It brought to mind what I'd heard about the Hemlock Society, an organization of older people who were choosing to opt out on their own terms.

I started writing Can I Get A Witness? as an absurdist Swiftian satire about climate change and what we would do to mediate it for the greater good. The solution of bowing out by age 50 was supposed to seem ridiculous, and raise the question: What are we willing to do for each other, and the planet, to ensure a 'good life' for all? The story was about consumption and how we all consume too much — including time. 

But it was really hard to get anybody's attention with this project back then.

Skip ahead a few years, and things looked very different. We'd been through the COVID-19 pandemic, where we saw how global agreement and implementation of protective protocols could happen practically overnight. We now had MAID in Canada, where people could choose to end their own lives as part of our medical system. Climate change was on everybody's mind. Extreme weather events were affecting everybody's lives in real time. And AI, besides its wonders, had become an existential threat to the livelihoods of a whole bunch of folks.  

Suddenly, the world of Can I Get A Witness? seemed less far-fetched.  

So I sent the script to Sandra Oh, who I had collaborated with on the animated feature Window Horses. I had written the character of Ellie — Kiah's mother and the OG end-of-life illustrator — with her in mind. She was intrigued by the treatment of death in the story. 

In fact, the discussion of end of life ended up bringing a lot of people to this project. Because, in the West, we don't really like to talk about it — at least, not in a way where we accept it as part of the cycle of life.

I knew I really wanted to shoot the film up in Powell River, B.C. I had spent some time there guest teaching at the Powell River Digital Film School started by Tony Papa, and had been so intrigued and impressed by the high school students — how they were dealing with so many adult issues while trying to figure out how they felt about anything. 

They didn't have a lot of experience with media, yet they were able to make such provocative, sensitive and visually literate work. I had been thinking about this experience, and that interstitial time when we are becoming, when I decided to make the leads in Can I Get a Witness? teens — young people with huge responsibilities.  

Powell River also has a slower pace of life. It's a place where people are trying to find a new way of being after the local mill on the site of the Tla'amin village, once the biggest pulp and paper mill in the world, stopped operating in 2021. It ultimately became a big character in the film, and the community really opened their arms to us. We also found magical coincidences happened everywhere.

Up the road from Powell River at the Tidal Art Centre in Lund, I met the amazing, multi-talented Prashant Miranda, a globe-hopping sketch artist. Prash, who came to Lund by way of Bangalore, was also intrigued with the project's treatment of the subject of dying and went on to create Kiah's drawings for the film.  

Tony Papa had encouraged me for years to shoot up in Powell River, but I knew it would have its challenges. I finally set sail, so to speak, with my longtime collaborator, Ruth Vincent; Raymond Massey, who has deep ties to this part of the qathet region; and Haydn Wazelle, whose mixture of tech, finance and theatre knowledge just makes me feel calm.

I reconnected with cinematographer C. Kim Miles — who shot The French Guy with me and the late, great Babz Chula — on Facebook and asked if he'd work with me again. My longtime animation collaborator, Kevin Langdale, came on board to make all the drawings come to life. I saw Joel Oulette in Trickster and knew he was right for the role of Daniel, Kiah's mentor. I did an open call to find Kiah, and there she was in Keira Jang. And Sandra said yes. 

Finally, miraculously, it all came together, and sustainability became both our theme and our mission. Devon Ellis-Durity put together our plan and tracked our CO2 emissions. Shooting on location has its carbon footprint challenges and limitations, but we barged up our vehicles, used recycled materials where possible, and were able to keep over 108,000 single-use items out of the landfill just by having water stations and washing dishes.

Over time, Can I Get a Witness? morphed from a biting satire into a gentle comedy into a love letter to this world, both because of the times and because of the human beings involved in making it. It became an exploration into what it is to be human, and a meditation on how beautiful it is to be here and how precious all life is. And also, as from the beginning, how to say goodbye.

Can I Get a Witness? screens at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, which runs September 5-15.