Can I Get a Witness?: 50 Is The New Life Expectancy

By Chris Knight

Rating: A

I remember walking out after a screening of Can I Get a Witness? at the Toronto International Film Festival last autumn, unsure what it wanted me to think about its central concept. After a second viewing last week, I was still up in the air.

That’s an odd feeling for a film to engender. Most movies set in some kind of dystopian future are pretty clear where their sympathies lie. In Children of Men, humanity’s lack of offspring is not good. In 28 Days Later or 12 Monkeys, the death of almost everyone is a downer. And in Logan’s Run, we’re meant to identify with Logan 5 and Jessica 6, sexy young people fleeing a society where everyone is killed off at 30.

But Can I Get a Witness?, written and directed by Ann Marie Fleming, is something else. Set in an unspecified near future (2050 is my guess) it imagines that life on Earth got pretty bad in the 2020s — so bad that humanity made some drastic changes to the way things operate.

In many ways, 2050 feels like 1850, give or take. Technology has been stripped away — young people can barely understand the concept of mass media, let alone social media. Long-distance travel is banned (bicycles are common), and people have minimal electricity and rationed water.

One difference is that in 1850s Canada, life expectancy was in the low 40s. In Fleming’s future, it’s a hard 50 — when you reach that age, the government mandates that you must die. It will even help you do it and, though the film doesn’t explore this, there’s a sense that running would be… unpleasant.

But unpleasantness isn’t where this movie lies, apart from the nagging notion that the concept of a five-decade limit seems cruel and unusual.

It’s certainly a tragic time to die — Fleming has said she chose it “because it hurts.” But it’s part of the solution that has allowed humankind to live quiet, idyllic lives on a rapidly recuperating planet.

The film’s website includes a copy of the movie’s Universal Constitution of Human Rights and Responsibilities, and a carbon-footprint calculator that tells you how much greenhouse gas you’ll be responsible for in this lifetime, and how much of that is from your senior years. It’s one helluva conversation starter, from one very thought-provoking story.

Can I Get a Witness? Directed by Ann Marie Fleming. Starring Keira Jang, Joel Oulette, and Sandra Oh. Opens in select theatres March 14 and elsewhere throughout the spring.

Curiosity piqued? Read our interview with Can I Get a Witness? actor Sandra Oh and writer-director Ann Marie Fleming.